postfix start script is buggy causing it not to startup when the /var/spool/postfix/pid/master.pid is not removed at shutdown

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Issue

Sometimes postfix is NOT being started upon system reboot, even though it is chkconfig-ed on. It seems this is due to the following script in /etc/init.d/postfix:

case "$1" in
  start)
        [ $running -eq 0 ] && exit 0
        start
        ;;

If we remove the following line to make it the same script as in RHEL5, then we will not hit this bug:

[ $running -eq 0 ] && exit 0
  • The issue only occurs when the pid file is not being removed on shutdown, and on startup another process is re-using the same pid as that in the /var/spool/postfix/pid/master.pid file.
  • In these instances the postfix startup script checks erroneously report that the postfix service has already started, resulting in the start script not being triggered.

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
  • postfix

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