Hi! Yesterday I mentioned a way how multiple postfix instances are managed in Debian. And I'm trying to find out what's the right way to do this, if at all.
As far as I can see, the only thing needed to manage a custom instance is to have a custom config with main.cf and master.cf in there, which points to custom queue_directory and data_directory, and use `postfix -c $config_directory start|stop|reload|...` -- ie, to specify this custom config directory on the command line (or using MAIL_CONFIG environment variable). This custom config_directory does not need to be referenced in /etc/postfix/main.cf (in multi_instance_directories), which is only needed for postmulti command. If main.cf has multi_instance_enable=yes, and multi_instance_wrapper set, an instance becomes a multi-instance, and `postfix start` will run the multi_instance_wrapper instead of the usual postfix-script, so an instance automatically becomes a multi-instance using the regular postfix command. And this probably can be nested if needed, I guess, at least in the part when an instance is started with -c $config_directory - so a custom main.cf might be a multi-instance setup too, not just the main one - but I haven't verified this. So, if a distribution chooses to manage multiple instances in a form of, say, separate systemd units, - it looks like postmulti tool is not the right tool to use here, - regular `postfix' tool with -c (or $MAIL_CONFIG) is the way to go. In other words, a distribution (or a user) can choose to run multiple independent postfix instances using `postfix -c DIR` way, managing them as independent systemd units (or using other means) - this is multiple instances of user-kind. And each such independent user-kind postfix instance might be a multi-instance by its own internally, using multi_instance_* parameters - this is multiple instance of postfix-kind. But we should not try to "help" postmulti to manage these "internal" postfix-kind multiple instances by turning them into user-kind instances. Does it look sane? Trying to turn postfix-kind multiple instances into user-kind is what debian is doing for a few releases. This is why I'm bringing this up, because, on one hand, postfix documentation is quite clear on this, but on the other, actual downstream usage seems to be not like this. Thanks, /mjt _______________________________________________ Postfix-users mailing list -- postfix-users@postfix.org To unsubscribe send an email to postfix-users-le...@postfix.org
