Postfix issue, code=exited, status=255

Rocky Linux General
1

Hello,

i am setting up a mail service on my server with posrfix and dovecot.
It seems to work, but I can an odd error message. Can’t find much at all in google.

   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/postfix.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Wed 2023-01-04 19:57:33 CET; 11min ago
  Process: 24600 ExecStop=/usr/sbin/postfix stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 24633 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/postfix start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 24631 ExecStartPre=/usr/libexec/postfix/chroot-update (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 24628 ExecStartPre=/usr/libexec/postfix/aliasesdb (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 24623 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/restorecon -R /var/spool/postfix/pid/master.pid (code=exited, status=255)

SELINUX=permissive

Thanks for the help.

Wolfgang

2

I don’t see anything odd in that message at all. All statuses are success, and the last one is restoring selinux contexts on the pid file which is also normal.

3

Thanks for clarifying. I was not sure because of code=exited.

Thanks again,

Wolfgang

4

When running it for the first time, it does this:

Because there is no /var/spool/postfix/pid/master.pid file while postfix is not running, running restorecon against the file before starting postfix.service returns a non-zero value of 255.

So it can be ignored. You will notice when you subsequently restart postfix it will not show this anymore because at this point a pid file exists.

You’ll also find this in /var/log/messages:

Jan  4 21:30:56 rocky8 restorecon[2338]: /usr/sbin/restorecon: lstat(/var/spool/postfix/pid/master.pid) failed: No such file or directory

thus backing that up, it tried to run restorecon against a PID that wasn’t yet created.