[Dovecot] Dovecot not accepting connections

[Jim]

On Mar 27, 2009, at 3:37 PM, Jim wrote:

> On Mar 26, 2009, at 6:01 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>
>> And what does "not accepting connections" mean? Does the TCP  
>> handshake finish? For example if you do:
>>
>> telnet localhost 143
>>
>> Does it
>>
>> a) Hang after "Trying 127.0.0.1..."
>> b) Hang after "Escape character is '^]'."
>> c) Say connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
>
> Naturally, now that I'm trying to duplicate the issue, I can't get  
> it to act up.  If I can get into a mode where it stops working  
> again, I'll try that and report back.

Finally had this happen again.  Connecting via localhost worked just  
fine, returned "OK Dovecot ready".  Connecting via my domain name  
resulted in a hung connection that eventually just timed out.  Nothing  
in my firewall that would be blocking this, port 143 redirects  
straight to my mail server as does port 80 and a few others, which all  
worked fine using my domain name for connections.  The problem is  
isolated to Dovecot.

The only odd thing that I noticed when I went to stop and restart the  
Dovecot process is that only one dovecot-auth process was running,  
normally I see two processing running.  After quitting Dovecot and  
starting it again, I saw two dovecot-auth processes start up, and then  
I was able to get mail just fine.

No errors in my mail.log that might have shed additional light on  
this.  mail_debug = yes was set when I was having this problem,  
nothing was logged during my failed connection attempt, Dovecot never  
received the connection.