[Dovecot] SOLVED Intermittent authentication failures

[Eric Shubert]

On 09/30/2011 12:59 PM, Eric Shubert wrote:
> On 09/30/2011 09:07 AM, Eric Shubert wrote:
>>
>> CRAM-MD5 works sometimes:
>> Sep 30 08:15:43 imap-login: Info: Login: user=<userA at domain.com>,
>> method=CRAM-MD5, rip=192.168.252.8, lip=192.168.252.14, mpid=20301
>>
>> but (seemingly more frequently) the authentication fails:
>> Sep 30 08:16:41 imap-login: Info: Aborted login (auth failed, 1
>> attempts): user=<userA at domain.com>, method=CRAM-MD5, rip=192.168.252.8,
>> lip=192.168.252.14
>>
>> I restarted dovecot, and that apparently cleared the problem for one
>> user, but not others.
>>
>> Is this perhaps a bug in dovecot, or would the problem lie with vpopmail?
>>
>> TIA for any pointers.
>>
>
> FWIW, I tried digest-md5, and experience the same problem.
>
> Is it possible that passwords are being cached in such a way that
> different login mechanisms cannot be used by different client programs
> with the same user account?
>

My problem was indeed with the password caching. I changed
cache_key=%u
to
cache_key=%u%r
and that cleared things up.

I expect that this is only a problem when different client programs use 
different login mechanisms, which was the case with this particular 
group of users.

I didn't anticipate this behavior, but can live with it. A note about 
this in the documentation would be nice. I tried to create an account on 
the wiki for myself to update it, but that doesn't seem to be working 
presently.

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'