Tony Narlock » Debian

Debugging and troubleshooting postfix

Tony Narlock — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:48:25 +0000

Error: Postfix isn't working with mail() on PHP automatically.

Common problem: You have exim or something else running.

Solution: try lsof -i :25. If you intend on using postfix, kill the pid of the app, remove the package of exim or sendmail if you have it installed. See This postfix thread on Ubuntu Forums.

Other issue: Postfix isn't working (miscellaneous)

Solution: tail /var/log/maillog or tail /var/log/mail.err (source)

Error: fatal: open lock file /var/lib/postfix/master.lock: unable to set exclusive lock: Resource temporarily unavailable

You may have another copy of postfix still open. Use lsof -i :25 to track down which process. kill the pid and postfix reload.

Error: postfix set-permissions returns
chown: cannot access `/usr/lib/postfix/dict_cdb.so': No such file or directory.

May be by design, #274108 in ubuntu launchpad says this command doesn't necessarily mean something's wrong.

Helpful resources

Ubuntu handbook page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix

Remove services (mpd) from system startup in Linux

Tony Narlock — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:57:27 +0000

I'm using MPD on Ubuntu and Debian and get annoyed by mpd starting at boot time under root.

Your startup services lie in the /etc/rc.d folder. You will observe that ls -l /etc/rc4.d for instance, will show you these files are weighted to run in order and symlink to their corresponding startup scripts in /etc/init.d.

To disable mpd, for instance, update-rc.d can help:

sudo update-rc.d -f mpd remove

Now you will be able to add mpd to a local user script on startup without having to sudo mpd --kill or sudo killall mpd.

Troubleshooting locales in the cloud on debian and ubuntu

Tony Narlock — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:52:21 +0000

If you use Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud Servers, you may end up running into this after your create your instance. I often get these on Debian and Ubuntu (since it's debian based also).

lennycloud:~# perl perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_US.UTF-8" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

You're missing locales.

Update your apt database. sudo apt-get update

Download locales. sudo apt-get install locales

Now configure it, and download what locales you need. dpkg-reconfigure locales on Debian. sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 on Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 (Note: on server, you may be logged in as root).

I pick en_US ISO-8859-1, en_US.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15 and en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8.

And that solves it.

Updated April 03, 2010 to include locale-gen.