Tweak postfix User IDs to align with Repair Permissions

Apr 14, '04 09:13:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

If you are in the habit of making sure you run Repair Permissions regularly (i.e. from weekly.local), you might have noticed that it "repairs" the Postfix directories such that Postfix will no longer work. The problem (on my 10.3.3 box, anyway) appears to be that the UID for the postfix user has changed from "27" to "255" at some point, and the Repair Permissions app is assuming the first is correct. When it changes the perms on various postfix directories, postfix will refuse to run.

Up to now, I've just been running a fixuppostfix script after the /usr/sbin/diskutil repairPermissions / command in my weekly.local to repair the repair. This works fine, but a bit of research on the web suggests that the postfix user is probably not quite right set to 255.

To fix this at the source, I opened up Netinfo Manager and selected users in column two, and postfix in column three. I changed the uid to 27 and saved the changes (you may be prompted to authenticate as an admin user).

Now, my periodic scripts don't break Postfix. No problems after a few weeks. An Apple update may break this in the future; at some point they will have to decide what the postfix UID is, and either Repair Permissions will agree with this, or not.

[robg adds: I don't run postfix and have no experience with it, so I can't comment on which UID is 'right.' If anyone can confirm (or not) this info, please feel free to do so in the comments...]

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