Postfix backward compatibility
Have another question again.
To setup Postfix, I have followed this tutorial:
After the setup when I queried Postfix with this command "systemctl status postfix.service", it reported back that it is running with backward compatibility. My questions is, why it is essential to run Postfix with backward compatibility?
The full output of the "systemctl status postfix.service" command is below:
postfix.service - LSB: Postfix Mail Transport Agent
Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/postfix; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
Drop-In: /run/systemd/generator/postfix.service.d
└─50-postfix-$mail-transport-agent.conf
Active: active (running) since Tue 2017-11-14 22:17:32 AEDT; 17s ago
Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
Process: 19539 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/postfix stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Process: 19567 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/postfix start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
CGroup: /system.slice/postfix.service
├─19685 /usr/lib/postfix/sbin/master
├─19686 pickup -l -t unix -u -c
└─19687 qmgr -l -t unix -u
Nov 14 22:17:32 localhost systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Postfix Mail Transport Agent…
Nov 14 22:17:32 localhost postfix[19567]: * Starting Postfix Mail Transport Agent postfix
Nov 14 22:17:32 localhost postfix[19648]: Postfix is running with backwards-compatible default settings
Nov 14 22:17:32 localhost postfix[19648]: See
Nov 14 22:17:32 localhost postfix[19648]: To disable backwards compatibility use "postconf compatibility_level=2" and "postfix reload"
Nov 14 22:17:32 localhost postfix[19567]: …done.
Nov 14 22:17:32 localhost systemd[1]: Started LSB: Postfix Mail Transport Agent.
Nov 14 22:17:32 localhost postfix/master[19685]: daemon started – version 3.1.0, configuration /etc/postfix
Thanks for help.
2 Replies
@emestee:
Recent postfix versions underwent some changes which interpret configuration differently and impose additional expectations and restrictions. Compatibility exists so that upgrades to existing servers do not break normal operation. For newly set up servers you can safely disable compatibility. For an existing server, upgrade your configuration and then disable compatibility.
Hi emestee - Many thanks for the clarification.