[Dovecot] auth probes without IP - "Initial status notification not received ..."

[Timo Sirainen]

On 17.6.2013, at 11.00, LEVAI Daniel <leva at ecentrum.hu> wrote:

> I've been getting a bunch of these messages lately in my logs:
> 
> dovecot: master: Error: service(auth): Initial status notification not received in 30 seconds, killing the process
> dovecot: auth: Fatal: master: service(auth): child 11016 killed with signal 9
> dovecot: master: Error: service(auth): Initial status notification not received in 30 seconds, killing the process
> dovecot: auth: Fatal: master: service(auth): child 27660 killed with signal 9
> 
> # fgrep -c -e "master: Error: service(auth): Initial status" dovecot.log*
> [...]
> dovecot.log.1:501
> dovecot.log.2:250
> [...]
> 
> But I can not link these auth probes to any IP addresses within the
> dovecot log files. This is dovecot-2.2.2 on OpenBSD-stable.

It looks like the auth processes are actually hanging at startup. Normally they'll finish send the notification immediately after they start up, but for some reason that's not happening here.. Or alternatively something else very weird is going on. Does Dovecot usually work? Maybe the status signalation via pipes isn't working correctly. Then I'd think it would be logging it for all processes, not just auth processes.