[Dovecot] Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused

[Chris Wakelin]

We've being running with Dovecot 1.0-stable since Tuesday, and on the 
whole it's gone very well (meaning nobody's noticed!). My best estimate 
is we're using half the disk accesses and 2/3 the CPU of UW-IMAP/Qpopper.

We've quite a mixture of error messages in the logs, the most worrying 
of which is that several times we've had a few seconds of "xxx-login: 
Can't connect to auth server at default: Connection refused" (where xxx 
is pop or imap). It seems to sort itself out shortly afterwards. We're 
using userdb=passwd, passdb=passwd (authenticating via NIS). From 
Tuesday we'll be using passdb=pam (pam_ldap to Active Directory).

My first guess is that some dovecot-auth process stops responding and 
gets killed off. Is this right?

Other errors we're seeing include
1) pread_full() failed with mbox file /export/mail/c/37/sau04djp/INBOX: 
No such file or directory (when there is!)
2) mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox (especially with 
.prayer folders - configuration folders for our Webmail)
3) file mbox-lock.c: line 505 (mbox_lock): assertion failed: (lock_type 
== F_RDLCK || ibox->mbox_lock_type != F_RDLCK)

presumably some of these are fixed in alpha2.

Best Wishes,
Chris

-- 
--+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+-
Christopher Wakelin,                           c.d.wakelin at reading.ac.uk
IT Services Centre, The University of Reading,  Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK              Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094