On 13/09/2026 09:25, Thomas Klausner wrote:
Hi! I'm rotating my SSL Certs with certbot, also for postfix and dovecot. Since certbot has no retart plugins for postfix and dovecot, I have a weekly cronjob that runs '/etc/rc.d/postfix restart' and another one for '/etc/rc.d/dovecot restart'. The postfix cronjob sends email immediately; the dovecot one only after a week, I think when the next dovecot restart cronjob runs. When I interactively run '/etc/rc.d/dovecot restart' it finishes quickly. Does anyone have an idea where that 1-week-delay could come from?
You can get certbot to restart postfix and dovecot when a certificate is renewed. It supports an argument called --deploy-hook which runs a script when the certificate is renewed. The domains renewed are passed into the script in an environment variable called RENEWED_DOMAINS so you can control which services restart based on the domain that is being renewed.
I might also have an idea what's going on with dovecot. There is an oddness in the /etc/rc.d/dovecot startup script when its run from cron jobs relating to stderr. I had problems restarting it in my deploy hook script until I adjusted my restart command for dovecot to:
/etc/rc.d/dovecot restart 2>/dev/null How I discovered that is lost to history as it was done years ago. Mike