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A fix for QMail hanging at startup time UNIX
Some users (including me) have noticed that the self-installing QMail package availble from Apple and OS X GNU sometimes hangs at start-up time when the qmail-start command is issued in /var/qmail/rc. To make the situation worse, the hang occurs before any logging takes place, so the poor sysadmin has no idea what went wrong.

This post suggests that the hang may be due to problems with resolving the UNIX user ID of one or more of the qmail-specific UNIX user accounts, and provides a remedy. Cutting right to the chase, the post suggests that the following command (as root):

nidump passwd / > /etc/passwd
will put information about the qmail users (which exists only in the NetInfo database) into the /etc/passwd file, where standard UNIX routines can find them in order to perform username-to-UNIX ID translation.

It worked for me!

[robg adds: I have not confirmed this one...]

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Not the problem
Authored by: twinspop on Sep 20, '03 01:03:17PM
Run a ktrace on qmail-start... it hangs while accessing /var/vm/app_profile. Something to do with application pre-heating. It is really annoying and I haven't found any info on how to fix it. My kludge is to remove app_profile and reboot. In my experience, a fresh app_profile will allow qmail to start. An old one will prevent it. Anyone know what running without app_profile will do? Unstable system? I dumped NI users into passwd a long time ago, and still have the qmail issues.

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A fix for QMail hanging at startup time
Authored by: sharrissf on Oct 03, '03 01:45:35AM

I just moved the startup stuff from
/System/Library/StartupItems/

to

/Library/StartupItems/

and the problem went away



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