I currently run a postfix mailserver and have souped it up to use all the latest security features (see Hamzah Khan’s blog for a good tutorial). One thing that had been bothering me though was the appearance of the above milter connection failures in the logs – even though these seemed to fail gracefully it was a worrying sign that something was Just Not Right.
After a lot of trial and error, it seems that the culprit is my postfix chroot jail. I had originally attempted to compensate for this by defining “Socket /var/spool/postfix/var/run/opendkim/opendkim.sock” in /etc/opendkim.conf, but even so, postfix was throwing errors (and no, putting the socket in the standard location doesn’t work – I tried that!). It turns out that postfix sometimes attempts to connect to the socket from inside the jail, and sometimes from outside. The solution is to create a soft link in the standard location pointing to the real socket inside the jail.
Of course I could have reconfigured it to bind to a localhost port instead, but the soft link was less work.
The Fifth Wheel of andrewg 