Comment 2 for bug 423653

I posted the below to the openvpn-users list:

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Hi all,

I need some help....

After using openvpn with some measure of success, it suddenly went south.

The symptom is that it would connect on ever even numbered attempt.
That is if i try to connect the first time it would give me and error, if i try to connect the second time it would connect successfully. If i tried a third, error, if I tried a fourth, success and so on.

The error in question was this....

***
script failed: external program exited with error status: 1
***

via gopenvpn a gui for openvpn on linux.

It then occur to me that I always had success at seeing what was really going on when ever I ran it straight from the command line.

The command line spit out this ever odd numbered attempt to connect to the server...

It would start to connect then give this error...

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/usr/sbin/postconf: fatal: open /etc/postfix/main.cf: No such file or directory
cp: `/etc/resolv.conf' and `/etc/resolv.conf' are the same file
run-parts: /etc/resolvconf/update-libc.d/postfix exited with return code 1
run-parts: /etc/resolvconf/update.d/libc exited with return code 1
Wed Sep 2 23:07:19 2009 script failed: external program exited with error status: 1
***

and there we have it ... it's postfix!!!

I recalled that I had installed rkhunter .. a rootkit checker for ubuntu linux. It had for some ungodly reason insisted that it need postfix and by extension mailx and bsd-mailx to be able to operate. This I believe are only recent dependancies in Jaunty. And it was about the time of the installed that openvpn began to misbehave. So I uninstalled postfix, mailx and bsd-mailx (I hope they are not of importance to have on the systerm) and was back in business. The errors were gone.

I somehow suspect thought that openvpn and postfix should be able to co-exist on the same machine. I remember when installing it I chose a no configuration option since i did not know why it was being forced on me and did not want to waste time configuring something i did not need.

So... does anyone know if these two things can coexist peacefully and what would need to be done for that to happen given the above error?

Thanks.