[Dovecot] Problem with running two dovecot instances on the same server

[Timo Sirainen]

On 30.7.2012, at 10.24, Alexandr Sabitov wrote:

>>> Jul 26 11:51:20 dovecot-test-1 dovecot: director: Error: Empty server list
>>> Jul 26 11:51:20 dovecot-test-1 dovecot: director: Fatal: Invalid value for director_mail_servers setting
>>> Jul 26 11:51:20 dovecot-test-1 dovecot: master: Error: service(director): command startup failed, throttling for 60 secs
>> Director process gets started for the backend installation where it of course isn't configured. My guess: doveadm (from some cronjob?) is attempting to connect to /var/run/dovecot/director-admin instead of /var/run/dovecot-proxy/director-admin.
> 
> Hi Timo,
> 
> Thanks for reply.
> 
> That's right:  strace shows that director process is a child of non-proxy dovecot (pid 7089) which is should not be happening. And I don't have any cronjob running.
> 
> Might we need just update dovecot wiki that if someone runs dovecot and dovecot-proxy then they have to be installed in different folders as
> separate binaries otherwise one instance cross over another somehow magically. :)

I have several such setups and they don't have this problem, so you've managed to create something that tries to connect there. One easy way to make sure this never happens is to just disable the socket:

service director {
  unix_listener director-admin {
    mode = 0
  }
}