mailq gets "Segmentation fault" (fedora core 5)

sickdude · 05-03-2007, 03:25 AM

Hi all,

Im on a postfix server running fedora core 5. I logged in because there are e-mail problems. So i wanted to check the mailq, but then i get the Segmentation fault error.

So i check out the status of the postfix deamon, it says Master stopped. Well ok thats fine with me, ill restart it.

service postfix start

Starting postfix: /etc/init.d/postfix: line 116: 14517 Segmentation fault /usr/sbin/postalias /etc/postfix/aliases
/etc/init.d/postfix: line 116: 14518 Segmentation fault /usr/sbin/postfix start 2>/dev/null 1>&2
[FAILED]

So now im a little confused, how do i fix this?
And what does a segmentation fault mean?

rcase5 · 05-03-2007, 03:58 AM

I don't use postfix myself, but here are a few quick bits of information and some suggestions to get you started...

First off, a "Segmentation Fault" means that a program has accessed an area of memory it was not supposed to access. This is like a GPF in Windows, and it's a hard crash.

Based on the log segment you posted, it sounds like there might be a problem with your /etc/postfix/aliases file. I would take a look and see if the file is corrupted. Maybe there's a character in there it doesn't like, or maybe two lines got accidentally joined together. The fact that it's in /etc means it's probably a text file, so I would look at it with "less" and see if you see some suspicious characters.

If everything looks okay there (and in case I'm totally misreading this log segment, which I think I might be), there might be an email in the queue which is badly formed, and maybe that's causing the crash. You would have to find out where postfix has it's incoming mail queue and look through the emails and see if something looks amiss. Any character that isn't a normal printable character might cause a problem. Postfix might keep incoming emails as separate files, and if you see a message that looks wrong, try deleting that file or moving it somewhere else and try starting postfix again. Qmail, the mail system I use, can have multiple files in different places for one incoming email, so you might have to hunt around if that is the case in postfix.

Hope this helps,

Robert...

jharris · 05-03-2007, 04:08 AM

You might also want to try running

Code:

/usr/sbin/postfix start

yourself to see if you get a more useful error message and possibly using strace to see what postfix is trying to do just before it dies so...

Code:

strace /usr/sbin/postfix start

HTH

Jamie

sickdude · 05-03-2007, 05:24 AM

Thnx guys for the fast reply's and i did had some use from it.

But there was a surprise.

The error that postfix isnt correct, there are no problems with memory.

This server is deliverd and installed by me, but the customer has root access to. yea i know not great.

The customer changed the hostname, but he did not did this the right way. When i did a hostname -s or -f it sayd unknown hostname. Postfix does a hostname check and it gets the wrong info, there even are some spaces in the output. The space in the output gives postfix a reason to think that there is a segmentation error.

So i fixed it

and thnx loads for your help guys

_MD_ · 05-08-2007, 10:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sickdude

When i did a hostname -s or -f it sayd unknown hostname. Postfix does a hostname check and it gets the wrong info, there even are some spaces in the output. The space in the output gives postfix a reason to think that there is a segmentation error.

So i fixed it

But how? I've checked a couple of resources online, and I, too, get the same error and hostname -s gives me unknown hostname...

I tried hostname myname.domain.com
then edited /etc/sysconfig/network

Code:

NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=myname.domain.com

/etc/hosts

Code:

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1       domain.com   myname        localhost.localdomain   localhost

Still the hostname doesn't want to change. I'm running Fedora Core2... Please help.

sickdude · 05-08-2007, 11:05 AM

Check out this tutorial about setting up linux hostnames, make sure that all these fields are filled out correctly

http://www.cpqlinux.com/hostname.html

_MD_ · 05-08-2007, 11:17 AM

Ahhh... changing /etc/hosts to

Code:

127.0.0.1	localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.0.10	mybox.mydomain.com	mybox

helped... Thanks a lot m8... =)))