[Dovecot] --log-error and the mysterious "not starting" problem

[Timo Sirainen]

On 5.2.2007, at 18.07, Marshal Newrock wrote:

> I've finally upgraded to 1.0.rc21.  If I run "dovecot --log-error",  
> then
> dovecot fails to start. The following appears in the log:
>
> Feb  5 10:54:00 taurus1 dovecot: Dovecot v1.0.rc21 starting up
> Feb  5 10:54:00 taurus1 dovecot: This is Dovecot's error log
>
> Without --log-error, it will start up fine from command-line.

Yes, that's exactly what it's supposed to do. I didn't think it could  
have been understood any other way :) The reason for --log-error's  
existence is that some people just can't seem to find the error logs,  
but once they do there's really no need to find them again.

> Dovecot still fails to start, as near as I can tell, in the specific
> condition that it is being started from a non-interactive shell and
> there is a mail_plugin set in "protocol imap".  mail plugins set for
> pop or lda do not cause this problem.  The failure to start appears in
> only two instances that I can see: on boot, or by a monitoring script
> if dovecot crashes, or, since I haven't seen dovecot die, when I
> manually stop it to see if the monitoring program will restart it.

By "fails to start" what exactly do you mean? It does one of the  
following:

  - log an error message
  - exit with non-zero exit code
  - crash

What does strace -f -o log dovecot show?
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