[Dovecot] dovecot loading during boot

[Karsten Bräckelmann]

On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 21:33 -0700, Robert W Nocella wrote:
> I have two RHEL4 email servers running postfix/MailScanner which use
> dovecot. They work great. But during bootup the nfslock script in my
> init.d loads rpc.statd and calls portmap to get a port number. Portmap
> keeps giving rpc.statd the imaps port number (993). I then have to stop my

The default for rpc.statd actually should be random, rather than a fixed
port...

> mail server services, manually start dovecot, then restart the mail server
> services and everything goes merrily on its way. Stopping the mail server
> services drops rpc.statd from using port 993(according to netstat -tlnp).
> This allows dovecot to take it by default. How to I reserve imap and imaps
> ports exclusively for use by dovecot. The imap and imaps ports are listed
> in /etc/services. Thanks for any insight.

The question is not how to "reserve" port 993 -- but how to make
rpc.statd (or most of the NFS stack for that matter) behave nicely, and
use a dedicated, fixed port instead of a random one. Since you are
ending up with the same port always, it is likely that this has been
configured to work that way. Not that 993 would be a sane choice,
though...

I once documented how to pin down NFS ports, though for a different
reason. ;)  However, it should help you to adjust the port in your case,
too. See the AllowNFS action and documentation here:
  http://lists.shorewall.net/~kb/

Please note, that this particular documentation applies to "RH style"
distros only (including Fedora and Mandriva). It's slightly different
for Debian. And impossible for SuSE out-of-the-box, given their
braindead [1] init scripts.

  guenther


[1] Yes, that is a technical term. ;)

-- 
char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0. at ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4";
main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}