Mayur's BLOG

If an error "qmail: alert: cannot start: unable to open mutex" is encountered while starting qmail.

Proceed with the following steps to fixing the error:-

1. Check the result of tail -f /var/log/messages as well as tail -f /var/log/maillog

If you can't trace the error from log files, please run the binary from /var/qmail/bin.

[root@serv ~]#cd /var/qmail/bin
[root@serv ~]#./qmail-send

2. If the error is something like "alert: cannot start: unable to open mutex"

[root@serv ~]# touch /var/qmail/queue/lock/sendmutex
[root@serv ~]# chown qmails:qmail /var/qmail/queue/lock/sendmutex

3.Restart qmail using the command

[root@serv ~]# /etc/rc.d/init.d/qmail start

Enjoy:)