[Dovecot] Problem with dovecot and system crashing

[Colin Kingsbury]

Hi all,

I am running dovecot on a linux server (FC3) in conjunction with
Sendmail. My configuration is quite vanilla and I am having the
following problem: occasionally (once every 3-10 days) the dovecot
server will become unresponsive and attempting to access mail via pop3
will produce an error message on the client side.

As best as I can tell, the dovecot process dies because if I restart
it with /sbin/service dovecot restart I get [failed] on the stop and
[ok] on the start.

Now, here's the interesting part: within 5 minutes of this happening,
the whole machine becomes completely unresponsive and requires a
power-cycle to restart it. In between dovecot dying and the server
going down, the other applications (apache, mysql) continue to run.
Naturally, there are no messages in the syslog or the maillog and it
is set to log all messages of info or higher.

Any suggestions on how to attack this would be greatly appreciated.

Best,
-cwk.