postfix logging no the known defaults

germebl

6/13/24, 7:27 AM

Actually i overtook the administration of a mail cluster which uses postfix. And i was really confused when i saw the different loggings:

one of the servers logs to a custom logfile, instead there is no maillog_file defined
another server of the cluster logs everything to the syslog file
the third server logs nothing
another two servers logging correctly

But all the settings are correct and there are no custom logfiles defined - so in my understanding it should use the rsyslog to log to the mail.log, mail.info, mail.warn and mail.err - but thats not happening correct.

I've read something about creating a rsyslog config file, to force the postfix logging to these files - but i'm not that much into it.

Maybe someone can support which way i can go to get it back/working into the default rsyslog files?

1 + 0

linux

debian

postfix

rsyslog

Score:0

Server

Nikita Kipriyanov

6/13/24, 10:26 AM

Download your rsyslog package:

apt-get download rsyslog

Then inspect a package file (rsyslog_8.2102.0-2+deb11u1_amd64.deb in my case):

dpkg -c rsyslog_8.2102.0-2+deb11u1_amd64.deb
...
-rwxr-xr-x root/root      2864 2022-05-21 01:05 ./etc/init.d/rsyslog
-rw-r--r-- root/root      1974 2022-05-21 01:05 ./etc/rsyslog.conf
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2022-05-21 01:05 ./etc/rsyslog.d/
...

You can extract a package (there are other ways to do that if you want to):

mkdir /tmp/1
dpkg-deb -x rsyslog_8.2102.0-2+deb11u1_amd64.deb /tmp/1

Now, the temporary directory /tmp/1 has the default Debian config of the rsyslog. You can compare that with the current config to confirm it's changed (or not):

diff /etc/rsyslog.conf /tmp/1/etc/rsyslog.conf

For reference, this is how mail section looks like in the config in the package version I was inspecting:

#
# Logging for the mail system.  Split it up so that
# it is easy to write scripts to parse these files.
#
mail.info                       -/var/log/mail.info
mail.warn                       -/var/log/mail.warn
mail.err                        /var/log/mail.err

If you're brave you can just reinstall the config files for the whole package:

apt install --reinstall -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-confask,confnew,confmiss" rsyslog

+ 1

germebl

6/14/24, 12:59 PM

Thats it! The rsyslog.conf was mostly broken. I've checked the last edit date and its fits to a maintenance the server had before some weeks (before i overtook the administration of it). I repaired it while having open the default one to find the broken parts. Everything is fine now again. Thank you!

Elon Musk

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EN: postfix logging no the known defaults

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