# postfix: unknown mail_owner



## dwc (Jun 14, 2002)

i've installed postfix on osx 10.1.5 and i setup vbulletin (such a cool program, i think).  Anyway, mail seems to be working fine, except when vbulletin tries to send mail.  All i see is this in my mail.log:

 fatal: unknown mail_owner configuration parameter value: postfix

the user for postfix is postfix.  Also, when i run the mailtest.php script that comes with vbulletin, it works, so i don't think it's a simple as saying that the apache user can't send mail.  i imagine it's some kind of permissions problem.  Has anyone encountered this?

i appreciate the help.


----------



## dwc (Jun 14, 2002)

well, i kind of solved the problem.

Wietse (of postfix) wrote this to me:

> Postfix looks up the "postfix" username with the getpwnam()
> system routine. That routine fails when
> 
> - The user does not exist in the UNIX password database.
> - Your SYSTEM (not POSTFIX) file permissions are incorrect.

so, i figured i just needed to add postfix to /etc/passwd.  i actually decided to do an nidump passwd .  > /etc/passwd.  The message no longer shows up. Instead, i get:

postfix/sendmail[6620]: fatal: unknown default_privs configuration parameter value: nobody

nobody is in both /etc/passwd and /etc/group.  Not sure what to do next.


----------



## dwc (Jun 14, 2002)

i used the instructions at stepwise and they worked fine.  

Actually, i started here:

http://www.hmug.org/HowTos/postfix.html


what's the errors you are getting?


----------



## dwc (Jun 15, 2002)

so, i still don't understand the problem completely, but i did manage to solve it.  Here's what i did:

i took a dump of the netinfo using information using:

    nidump passwd . > master.passwd

The dump is in the format of the file /etc/master.passwd.  i copied the file to passwd and edited it, since it's format is slightly different from master.passwd.

in master.passwd, a line looks like this:

  postfix:*:23456:23456::0:0:Mail:/tmp:/usr/bin/false

in passwd, it looks like this:

  postfix:*:23456:23456:Mail:/tmp:/usr/bin/false

i think you only need the users postfix and nobody to make the mail system work.  Not sure though.

obviously, php's mail function is using some lowlevel c library that doesn't query lookupd (to ask netinfo) for password information.

i hope apple will sync these files up with netinfo.


----------

