[Dovecot] Lots of pop3-logins

[V S Rao]

> > > Doing a "ps aux" on my Slackware box, I have approx 100  PID's of "pop3-login's going on.  This is a production mail server, but it is getting VERY low traffic.  In fact, only 3 people can "pop3" into it.  I've check their e-mail clients, and they are not checking mail any more often than every 5 minutes.
> > > 
> > > This is a new installation and I've had the server up and running since Sunday.  If it matters, I'm using Postfix for the MTA and using the Dovecot SASL library to AUTH SMTP.
> > > 
> > > Is this a cause for concern?  Why does Dovecot need this many processes?
> > > 
> > 
> > >> Because dovecot preforks the *-login processes to speed-up the login.
> > 
> > >> No need to worry.
> > 
> > 100 login sessions for just 3 connections? That is not right, no matter what.
> 
> >> No, login_processes_count matters.
> 
> How? If my understanding is correct, you have extra 3 login processes created to cater to new connections. So with only 3 POP3 users, why should so many login processes be spawned? I can understand 10-15. But 100 definitely indicates either the processes are not dying or something else happening on the system which is causing such high number of login processes. The system definitely needs to be checked for some kind of attack, a rogue process running on the system or something else. 
> 

>> My idle box has 64 imap-login processes and no, I'm not under a
>> dictionary attack :)

I am not sure what your load is (user base, system config etc), but I will give you my typical load here. I run mail server for about 6000 users with a mix of 70% POP3 and 30% IMAP (thro webmail). And here are the typical stats (I run a script in the background collecting this data every 5 secs):

pop3-logins:12
pop3-connections:8
IMAP-logins:7
IMAP-connections:11

I have read other opinions in this thread by Timo & others. And I am interested in a few things. So if you will indulge me, maybe it will be useful for others who face these kind of issues

Timo Wrote: You can also just decrease login_process_max_count

Wouldn't decreasing the login_process_max_count simply create more problems. Now users will start experiencing timeouts sooner than before, because whatever is causing the login processes to increase (attack, rogue process or whatever) will *always* be trying to login and genuine users will be denied login. So without knowing the root cause of the issue simply decreasing or increasing the login_process_max_count will lead to other problems. Correct me if I am wrong. 

Rodman Wrote: I'll go ahead and lower that limit to something that fits my usage better.

No, I think leave that value to default and try and identify the root cause and prevent it. 

Noel Wrote: What would be nice is, an anti brute force option

Yes, that would be nice. But consider a situation where the system is not under brute force attack, but for some reason the number of login processes keep on increasing by the hour. This would ultimately lead the system to deny connections to the users. Is there a way to track what is happening? strace would be too complicated for us field guys to work with. Any suggestions?

Regards
--Rao