[Dovecot] pipe() error but not linked to kqueue

[Peter Eriksson]

Patrick Milvich wrote:
> I have dovecot 1.0.5 installed on an OpenBSD 4.1 box and an OS X Server
> 10.4.10 box.
> 
> Sure you've all heard it before, because of the pipe error, no more
> login processes can be launched, and I have to restart the server.
> 
> dovecot: Sep 13 05:50:00 Error: pipe() failed: Too many open files
...
> Wondering if anyone else has seen this issue, and also in a generic
> problem. How are others dealing the the problem of being attacked in
> this method? Is there a max number of login tries for a given ip address
> within a period of time that I'm missing? :)

I see the same type of error on our system (Solaris 10, Dovecot 1.0.3).
I've had to up the limit of file descriptors to 16384 for the "dovecot"
process so that it will be able to run for a sane amount of time before
running out.

The strange thing is that it normally stay around 250 used file
descriptors (we have about 350 users here, not everyone using the system
at the same time) and then suddenly things runs amok...

- Peter

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