Monitor Postfix Mail Queue

[Marc Powell]

On Sep 28, 2009, at 4:46 PM, Scott Miller wrote:

> I'm trying to get Nagios to monitor a local Postfix Mail Queue, with  
> no
> luck.  The service keeps reporting OK: Postfix mailq has 0 messages  
> queued,
> when I know for a fact there are messages in the queue.  I'm wanting  
> to use
> Nagios on this local machine to monitor the queue, and alarm/notify  
> when it
> reaches a certain threshold.  I have modified the check_mailq to the
> following: (retrieved from
> http://wiki.osuosl.org/display/LNX/Nagios+Postfix+Mailq+Plugin )


> # let's get to it
> # my $result = `/usr/sbin/postqueue -p`;
>
> # Do it more lightweight
> my $result = `ls -1 /var/spool/postfix/deferred/*/* 2>/dev/null | wc  
> -l`;

Strange that they wouldn't use postqueue...

>
> I did modify one line above - because it was reporting 0 messages in  
> queue.
> I changed:
>
> my $result = `ls -1 /var/spool/postfix/deferred/?/* 2>/dev/null | wc  
> -l`;
> to read:
> my $result = `ls -1 /var/spool/postfix/deferred/*/* 2>/dev/null | wc  
> -l`;
>
> Still - it reports (OK: Postfix mailq has 0 messages queued), when  
> at this
> time there are 9 messages in queue.
>
> Anyone have any luck implementing this with postfix?  If so, can  
> anyone see
> what I'm doing wrong?

While I can't give the postfix specific answer to this, I can pretty  
much guarantee it's because the user you are running the plugin as  
does not have access to /var/spool/postfix or anything beneath it. I  
do not know how finicky postfix is with permissions but you may be  
able to add the nagios user to the group that those files/directories  
are members of, verify read permissions exist for the group and try  
again.

IMHO, the better way is to use postqueue, either preferably with sudo  
or with sticky bit.

--
Marc


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