What starts postfix when "Enabled SMTP" is unchecked?

Brian Willoughby brianw at sounds.wa.com
Thu May 10 13:05:02 PDT 2007


Hi all,

I have Mac OS X Server running on an Xserve, but I disabled "postfix"  
in Server Admin under "Mail" by unchecking "Enable SMTP" on the  
"Settings" page.  I compiled sendmail, moved postfix aside by  
renaming /usr/sbin/sendmail as /usr/sbin/postfix-sendmail, and then  
installed sendmail as /usr/sbin/sendmail ... sendmail seems to be  
running fine and doing everything I configured it for.

However, I still get a few messages delivered by postfix, such as the  
daily email from calendar
(I added a line to /etc/daily.local which runs "/usr/bin/calendar -a"  
and works rather nicely)
/var/log/mail.log shows entries from postfix/qmgr and postfix/pipe,  
so I'm wondering how these daemons even got started.  postfix/qmgr is  
running as a daemon with the command line "qmgr -l -t fifo -u" - I've  
even searched /etc/ and /System/Library/StartupItems/ for "qmgr" and  
"-l -t fifo -u" and can't see anything that might start the daemon.   
I also searched the text of /usr/bin/calendar for "postfix" to see if  
it directly calls postfix somehow for delivery.  The thing is, I get  
two emails from calendar, one delivered by sendmail and one delivered  
by postfix.

If anyone has a clue as to what is starting the postfix qmgr daemon,  
I'd be happy to know how to defeat it.

The only thing I haven't tried is deleting my postfix-sendmail backup  
entirely, but I can't see how any existing code is finding this  
unless it's checking by inode number, or by some other filename which  
is hard-linked to the old (postfix) sendmail.  I did a find -inum and  
didn't see any hard links.

I've run out of ideas!

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting



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