This is a tale about getting rid of postfix-watch.If you using mac os x server, and started up postfix by using postfix start, you may have noticed that postfix gets shut down by postfix-watch. postfix-watch is a daemon that starts up postfix when needed, and shuts it down when it is inactive. However, this is bad if you want postfix to listen for connections. You could use server admin to change the config, but if you made any changes to your main.cfg file, server admin may stomp on the file.
The easiest thing to do it do it yourself (“if you want something done right, darn it, do it yourself!”). It is simple. postfix-watch is started up by the startup item Postfix (in /System/Library/Startup Items/Postfix). If it sees "MAILSERVER=-AUTOMATIC-" or "MAILSERVER=-NO-" in /etc/hostconfig, the startup item starts up postfix-watch. If the startup item sees "MAILSERVER=-YES-", then it starts up postfix and leaves it running. To do it manually, edit /etc/hostconfig, change "MAILSERVER=-NO-" to "MAILSERVER=-YES-", kill postfix-watch, and start up postfix with postfix start.
Timothy Perfitt
Timothy Perfitt is currently the head of Twocanoes Software, Inc, creator of iOS and Mac apps for the IT market. Prior to Twocanoes Software, he survived the collapse of the dot com era by jumping from Coolboard.com to Apple, Inc in 2001. He worked on the initial certification training materials for Mac OS X, worked in Education Sales, and then finished his time at Apple in 2012 working with Fortune 500 customers to integrate Macs and iOS devices into complex environments. He is a returned Peace Corps volunteer, serving in the Solomon Islands as a math and science teacher from 1991 to 1993.
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nice site! sweet…
i was going to post this awhile ago, but thought i was crazy. i started using
postfix on 10.3 client and i always had /etc/hostconfig set to MAILSERVER=-
AUTOMATIC- seemed to work fine for my needs, but upon moving to 10.3.x
server i changed this to MAILSERVER=-YES- this might be totally unrelated,
but i find after setting it to yes, if i ever need to restart the server the postfix
startup item fails to load, but i find it actually is running. this seems to be
related to the entry in /etc/watchdog.conf – postfix:respawn:/usr/libexec/
postfix/master… if you delete that line or comment it out, it will be placed
back in by periodic daily… if i reboot, i find myself having to manually delete
this line before i reboot. how do you kill that?