[dovecot] Weird problem on Alpha

[Amelia A.Lewis]

Heyas ...

Hope you aren't tired of me already ....

I have a very strange problem, I think.  Having become happy-happy with
dovecot, I decided to install it on another machine that runs on an
internal network and provides mailboxes for system monitoring.

The setup is, or should be, quite straightforward.  TLS is disabled,
plaintext is not (I'll change this later, probably; this way is in
theory easier to debug).  Maildir; the MAIL environment variable is
correctly set.  Authentication via pam, for real users on the system,
auth_user root.  Pretty much as-distributed, except for disabling TLS.

On attempted login, the client hangs.  The following two messages appear
in syslog:

Jan  5 21:42:43 talifane imap-master: login: received another "not listening" notification
Jan  5 21:43:43 talifane imap-login: Disconnected: Inactivity [127.0.0.1]

Watching on lo via tcpdump, interesting things happen.  If I login with
the wrong password, the disconnect is quick (the message in syslog is
different, just "Disconnected [127.0.0.1]" from imap-login).  The server
responds to the a0001 LOGIN command with a0001 NO Authentication failed.
 That's as expected.  If I give the correct password, though, the server
never responds.  Note that the 'not listening' message appears sixty
seconds before the disconnection for inactivity message.  In tcpdump,
it's clear that the client never gets anything that would give it reason
to try another command.

So ... have I managed to pull a total bimbo and misconfigure?  Or is
this a problem with the Alpha platform?  I wanted to check before
reporting a bug, but this is kinda strange, since it's about the
simplest configuration that I can think of.  Suggestions (for testing,
or for fixing) would be welcome.  Is there a way to start the daemon in
a particularly verbose mode?  In case it's useful, here's what the
debian reportbug system generates for dependencies and stuff (0.99.5-1):

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: alpha
Kernel: Linux talifane 2.4.19 #1 Sat Aug 3 10:33:38 EDT 2002 alpha
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US

Versions of packages dovecot depends on:
ii  libc6.1                       2.3.1-9    GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libgcrypt1                    1.1.10-2   LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr
ii  libgnutls5                    0.6.0-2    GNU TLS library - runtime library
ii  libpam0g                      0.76-9     Pluggable Authentication Modules l
ii  libtasn1-0                    0.1.2-1    Manage ASN.1 structures (runtime)
ii  openssl                       0.9.6g-10  Secure Socket Layer (SSL) binary a
ii  zlib1g                        1:1.1.4-8  compression library - runtime

It's specifically a PC164LX/533, 512MB RAM.

Thanks for reading.

Amy!
-- 
Amelia A. Lewis                    amyzing {at} talsever.com
You like the taste of danger, it shines like sugar on your lips,
and you like to stand in the line of fire
just to show you can shoot straight from your hip.
There must be a 1000 things you would die for; 
I can hardly think of two.
		-- Emily Saliers