Postfix fatal: open lock file /var/lib/postfix/master.lock: cannot open file: Permission denied

Question

I have recently installed postfix and while configuring the server have run into an issue. At one point I received the error from my syslog,

fatal: open lock file /var/lib/postfix/master.lock: cannot open file: Permission denied

I am logged in as root. On another forum I had the recommendation to remove the file master.lock and to run an apt-get update, then restart. I did these and log back in to find that my directory is empty.

ls -l /var/lib/postfix/
total 0

I have then tried to purge the program by doing apt-get purge postfix as root and reinstalling the program. No matter what I do, I cannot get the files back under /var/lib/postfix/.

Solution

The file /var/lib/postfix/master.lock is used to ensure that only one copy of Postfix's "master" process is active. If Postfix shuts down cleanly, all /var/lib/postfix/*.lock files will be deleted. If Postfix does not shut down cleanly, some *.lock files will be left over.

Comments

[qbi]

What are you trying to do? Have you permission problems or do you want to get files under /var/lib/postfix?

[slayton1213]

Ok that solves that issue. Now I have another. I cannot get postfix to start. Here is my main.cf:

[vanadium]

Unclear what you want the user to do in order to solve the issue.