[Dovecot] 1.0rc_15 - imap-login disappearing

[James Pattinson]

James Pattinson wrote:
>  
> Runing rc24 now. And (maybe) coincidentally the problem surfaced 
> almost immediately. 3 imap-logins running, loaded my mail client, 2 
> running. Accessed another folder within the client, 1 process running. 
> Restarted my mail client, and the login was successful but I now have 
> no imap-login process running. Navigating to another folder fails as 
> expected.
>
> Restarted dovecot, and it's all fine again! I've logged in about 10 
> times since then and it's stable... for now.

I think I have found the problem. I had a feeling reboots had something 
to do with it, and just discovered that rebooting pretty much guarantees 
that I will hit the problem. This led me to look at my bootup logs.

It seems that my hardware clock is set incorrectly (one hour ahead), and 
ntp has been correcting my clock after every boot, which is what it 
should do. However, this ntp update was occurring AFTER dovecot starts.

Correcting my clock has completely fixed it!

So if this is a bug - then to reproduce it you need to start dovecot, 
set the system clock back some amount of time (one hour in my case) and 
you'll get disappearing imap-logins. I suppose if I had waiting another 
few weeks this problem would have magically fixed itself for 6 months! 
*grin*

Cheers,

James