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Free Radical
Asked: 2020-04-21 03:50:12 +0800 CST

How do I get rid of errors and warnings in /etc/mail.log pertaining to a defunct mailman installation?

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I have an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS server that at one point in time was set up (not by me) to run GNU mailman, using Postfix as the MTA.

I no longer run any mailinglists on this server, and have ‐ to the best of my ability ‐ tried to remove and purge Gnu mailman from the server by running these commands:

sudo apt remove mailman
sudo apt autoremove mailman
sudo apt purge mailman
sudo apt autoremove --purge mailman

This removes mailman and some (most?) configuration and data files, but when I look in the Postfix log (/var/log/mail.log), I get these about every five minutes:

[…]: error: open database /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases.db: No such file or directory
[…]: warning: hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases is unavailable. open database /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases.db: No such file or directory
[…]: warning: hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases: lookup of 'root' failed

I understand why I get them, since purging GNU mailman deleted all those files.

I am pretty sure that the program that requests these files is Postfix, as running:

sudo service postfix status

… produces the same three lines of errors and warnings. However, I am unable to figure out what it is that makes Postfix want to open these files.

Restarting postfix:

sudo systemctl restart postfix

… cleans out the errors, but only temporary. After about five minutes, they are back when I check status.

The question is this: How to I get rid of these errors and warnings (without reinstalling the no longer needed application)?

server email postfix mailman

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I found this out by searching for the filname in and below /etc.

    It looks like the reason Postfix tries to access the files /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases and /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases.db stems from this line in /etc/postfix/main.cf (the Postfix main configuration file):

    alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases, hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases

    Changed it to:

    alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases

    … and restarted Postfix.

    As far as I able to tell, this fixes it. (I used to get these log entries every five minutes. It is now thirty minutes since I restarted Postfix and there is no new log entries about "mailman".)

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  2. There may be some processes still running that are trying to write to those locations. Use fuser to figure out what they are.

    As per the logs themselves, Check /etc/rsyslog.conf and look for a mailman entry.

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