Improve feedback of postfix systemd unit start failure

[Karl-Philipp Richter]

The output in `journalctl -u postfix` is

    Aug 31 17:09:24 richtercloud systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Postfix Mail Transport Agent...
    -- Subject: Unit postfix.service has begun start-up
    -- Defined-By: systemd
    -- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
    --
    -- Unit postfix.service has begun starting up.
    Aug 31 17:09:24 richtercloud postfix[15171]: * Starting Postfix Mail Transport Agent postfix
    Aug 31 17:09:25 richtercloud postfix[15171]: ...fail!
    Aug 31 17:09:25 richtercloud systemd[1]: postfix.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1
    Aug 31 17:09:25 richtercloud systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Postfix Mail Transport Agent.
    -- Subject: Unit postfix.service has failed
    -- Defined-By: systemd
    -- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
    --
    -- Unit postfix.service has failed.
    --
    -- The result is failed.
    Aug 31 17:09:25 richtercloud systemd[1]: Unit postfix.service entered failed state.
    Aug 31 17:09:25 richtercloud systemd[1]: postfix.service failed.

which doesn't contain any useful information about the reason for the failure.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.04
Package: postfix 2.11.3-1ubuntu1
Uname: Linux 4.1.3-040103-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.17.2-0ubuntu1.1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Aug 31 14:41:32 2015
EtcMailname: richtercloud.de
Hostname: richtercloud
InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-04-20 (132 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Server 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" - Release amd64 (20141022.2)
PostconfMydomain: localdomain
PostconfMyhostname: richtercloud.de
PostconfMyorigin: /etc/mailname
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ResolvConf:
 # Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)
 # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN
 nameserver 192.168.178.1
 nameserver 127.0.0.1
SourcePackage: postfix
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to vivid on 2015-04-24 (128 days ago)
mtime.conffile..etc.postfix.post.install: 2013-03-12T04:08:14
mtime.conffile..etc.postfix.postfix.files: 2013-03-12T04:08:14
mtime.conffile..etc.postfix.postfix.script: 2013-03-12T04:08:14

[Robie Basak (racb)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.

Please could you explain what you're expecting instead here? Are the postfix log files not sufficient?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

postfix only ships an init.d script, which makes it impossible to capture any stdout/stderr into the journal (or rsyslog etc.). So this would translate to "please ship a proper systemd unit".

However, this particular bug report just shows that your file system (or even hard disk) is seriously broken: https://launchpadlibrarian.net/215975520/JournalErrors.txt shows tons of errors, and amongst them some reasons for postfix:

Aug 31 08:03:42 hostname postfix/trivial-rewrite[22559]: fatal: /etc/mailname: file has 2 hard links

Closing as this is not a problem with postfix but with a corrupted file system.