[Dovecot] Resource temporarily unavailable?

[Todd Burroughs]

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, Marc Perkel wrote:

> Todd,
>
> I'm using Fedora Core 4. The problem seems to have gone away. Not sure what I 
> did to fix it.
>
> I changed this:
>
> mechanisms = plain

I have this set as well.  I see this problem fairly often and it usually
resolves itself after a few minutes.

> I also put the user dovecot in the mail group. That might have fixed it.

I haven't tried that one...

> One thing I'd like to suggest is that this error would be better if it had 
> more information about what resource wasn't available.

The error is EAGAIN caused from the socket() system call.

Looking at socket(7), I see this:

        It is possible to do non-blocking IO on sockets by setting
        the  O_NONBLOCK  flag  on  a  socket file descriptor using
        fcntl(2).  Then all operations that would block will (usu­
        ally)  return  with  EAGAIN  (operation  should be retried
        later); connect(2) will  return  EINPROGRESS  error.   The
        user  can  then  wait  for  various  events via poll(2) or
        select(2).

Near as I can tell, this is what it's supposed to mean, but the error
seems to be generated before the O_NONBLOCK gets set.

> Todd Burroughs wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 1 Aug 2005, Marc Perkel wrote:
>> 
>>> What would cause this?
>>> 
>>> dovecot: Jul 31 19:31:17 Error: imap-login: Can't connect to auth server 
>>> at default: Resource temporarily unavailable
>> 
>> 
>> What OS are you using?  I see the same problem, but haven't been able
>> to figure out why yet.  I'm running SuSE Linux 9.2 with a 2.6 kernel.
>> 
>> It should mean something like you've run out of file descriptors or
>> sockets, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
>> 
>> Todd
>> 
>
> -- 
> Marc Perkel - marc at perkel.com
>
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