[Dovecot] Linux Bootup: Dovecot Failure

[Stan Hoeppner]

Christopher Metter put forth on 10/23/2010 4:02 PM:
>  Hi there!
> 
> 
> Im using a dovecot system in combination with postfix(with dovecot lda)
> and ldap. Till today it ran well, but before switching to live, i did
> some system updates and at the reboot following message occured:
> 
> Starting IMAP/POP3 mail server: dovecoUnexpected first line <localhost:
> timed out, nothing received>

This is an NTP error--has nothing to do with Dovecot.  Apparently you're
missing a loopback interface (127.0.0.1) or you have a goofy iptables
setup breaking access to the LBI.  If simply the former, create a
loopback interface and reboot.  Problem should be solved.  If the
latter, find the iptables rule causing the problem and eject it.

> (First it says: "Starting IMAP/POP3 mail server: dovecot ", but then
> something fails and overrides the "t" of dovecot with "Unexpected.... ")

Stuff is constantly overwritten on the physical console on Linux boxen
these days.  This is "normal", although unsettling.  Parallel daemon
startup is now the default on most (all?) distros today.  This allows
faster startup, but it also causes errors to be reported "out of order".
 In your case, ntpd was started but it took a few seconds to timeout.
By that time many other daemons had started up.  It just happens that
ntpd timed out right when Dovecot was loading, so it "appears" the error
is Dovecot related, when in fact, it is not.

You can eliminate this problem by disabling parallel startup.  This will
fix the "out of order error reporting" but your machine will start up
much more slowly, especially if have any daemons that always time out.
;)  I highly recommend you _not_ disable it.

Oh, and btw, fix your ntp configuration to act as a client only, not
both a client and server, and configure an external time source.  Mail
servers, above all others but maybe DB servers, need the clock to be
accurate.

-- 
Stan