[Dovecot] error - dovecot - child (login) killed with signal 16

[Chris Hoogendyk]

We've been happily running Dovecot in Solaris 10 for about 8 months now.

Yesterday, Solaris 10's SMF put it in maintenance mode (shut it down) seemingly out of the blue. The 
only thing going on was that I had updated the ssl certificate. We had previously been using a self 
signed cert. Now we have a cert from InCommon. We had a problem with a few users who are still on 
ancient Eudora and didn't have the proper authority chains. We had a problem with a few Thunderbird 
users who hadn't set up the fully qualified server name in their configuration. The shutdown was 
coincident (and could be just a coincidence) to the minute with my boss working with a Windows 
Thunderbird user to change their configuration.

I can't figure out how this happened or why. I don't see how to track it any further than what I 
have here, and it doesn't make sense that a user issue or process could cause this. The IP, by the 
way, is our NAT. So no way of telling much from that.

 From /var/adm/dovecot.log:

Feb 24 15:52:57 marlin dovecot: [ID 583609 local2.error] dovecot: child 21233 (login) killed with 
signal 16 (ip=128.119.55.8)
Feb 24 15:52:58 marlin dovecot: [ID 583609 local2.warning] dovecot: Killed with signal 15 (by 
pid=26750 uid=0 code=kill)

Note that the first line is logged as an error.

These items from the SMF service log for dovecot:

[ Feb 24 15:52:58 Stopping because process received fatal signal from outside the service. ]
[ Feb 24 15:52:58 Executing stop method ("/etc/mail/svc/method/dovecot.init.d stop") ]
Stopping Dovecot

are the source of the signal 15 in the second line of the dovecot log above.

So, the presumption is that the signal 16 precipitated SMF to put the service in maintenance mode 
which lead to the signal 15.

Any ideas what went wrong here? How to track it down? How to prevent it from happening again?

Doing `svcadm clear dovecot` cleared the maintenance mode and started it up again. No problems since.


-- 
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Chris Hoogendyk

-
    O__  ---- Systems Administrator
   c/ /'_ --- Biology&  Geology Departments
  (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst

<hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu>

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Erdös 4