negative auth cache?

[Will Yardley]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 11:41:14PM -0700, Will Yardley wrote:
> (is it connecting to the wrong instance's auth socket? the path to the
> 'main' instance's auth socket is /var/run/dovecot-main/auth-master)
> 
> and then I see
> # doveadm -i main auth cache flush
> 0 cache entries flushed

Seems that the problem was that I had a symlink (for convenience) of
/var/run/dovecot to /var/run/dovecot-director (so that I don't have to
specify the instance name for common operations, which mostly involve
the director).

If I remove that symlink, and run the command with '-i main'

# doveadm -i main auth cache flush
904 cache entries flushed


The relevant code is something like:
if (auth_socket_path == NULL) {
    auth_socket_path = t_strconcat(doveadm_settings->base_dir,
                                   "/auth-master", NULL);

I'm guessing that auth_socket_path isn't null for some reason, and thus
the auth_socket_path isn't constructed correctly in this case, even
though the instance is being specified?

# doveadm instance list
path                           name     last used           running
/var/run/dovecot-director      director 2014-09-18 20:01:12 yes    
/var/run/dovecot-main          main     2014-09-18 20:01:12 yes   

# doveconf -i main base_dir
base_dir = /var/run/dovecot-main

w