[Dovecot] Dovecot refuses connections

[John Rowe]

I have recently upgraded to dovecot 1.0.0 on two machines running
Scientific Linux 4.3/4.4 x86_64 kernel 2.6.9-22.0.1.EL. The systems come
with openssl 0.9.7a and I have installed openssl-0.9.8e. Everything is
64-bit.

/usr/local64/sbin/dovecot -n
# /usr/local64/etc/dovecot.conf
disable_plaintext_auth: no
login_dir: /usr/local64/var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable: /usr/local64/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
first_valid_uid: 100
mail_extra_groups: mail
default_mail_env: mbox:%h/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
mail_location: mbox:%h/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
mail_debug: yes
mmap_disable: yes
lock_method: dotlock
mbox_read_locks: lockf
mbox_write_locks: lockf
auth default:
  passdb:
    driver: pam
  userdb:
    driver: passwd

I have two issues:

1. It won't start from xinetd. I get very little in the logs, just:

Apr  7 07:07:41 xyz xinetd[2545]: START: imaps pid=17445
from=144.173.228.126
Apr  7 07:07:41 xyz xinetd[2545]: EXIT: imaps pid=17445 duration=0(sec)

where 'xyz' is the host name

2. If I instead I run dovecot as a daemon then both my machines have
suffered the problem where dovecot runs for several days and then
disallows connections with:

Apr 29 04:06:07 xyz dovecot: imap-login: opendir(.) failed when trying
to get list of authentication servers: Permission denied
Apr 29 04:06:07 xyz last message repeated 2 times
Apr 29 04:06:07 xyz dovecot: child 5645 (login) returned error 89
Apr 29 04:06:07 xyz dovecot: child 5646 (login) returned error 89
Apr 29 04:06:07 xyz dovecot: child 5647 (login) returned error 89

Killing and restarting dovecot seems to fix it.

Thanks for your help.

John