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

[Marshal Newrock]

On Mon, 5 Feb 2007 19:48:39 +0200
Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:

> 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.

Ah, I guess I hadn't understood that part.  :p

> > 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

There are no error messages logged.  I'm not sure how to tell if it
exits with a non-zero exit code.  For that, I'd need another program
which will run in the background and then try to start dovecot, and
report the error code. I'm not sure offhand how I'd do that.

> What does strace -f -o log dovecot show?

I set monit to start dovecot with "/usr/bin/strace -f -s 255
-o /root/dovecot-startup.log /usr /sbin/dovecot
-c /etc/dovecot/dovecot-test.conf"

/etc/dovecot/dovecot-test.conf is mostly a copy of the standard
dovecot.conf file, but with the mail executables set back to the
default, and the quota plugin enabled for imap.  I did this to keep the
test configuration from being copied to other machines.

Output of strace is attached.

-- 
Marshal Newrock, Ideal Solution LLC
http://www.idealso.com

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dovecot-startup.log
Type: text/x-log
Size: 23338 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20070205/714fbf2f/attachment-0001.bin