shutdown_clients has no effect on doveadm stop

[aki.tuomi at dovecot.fi]

> On June 14, 2016 at 6:02 PM Roland Rosenfeld <rrosenfeld at netcologne.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> I try to restart dovecot 2.2.24 (for changing limits) without killing
> all IMAP and POP3 sessions.
> 
> dovecot(1) tells me:
>        When shutdown_clients is set to no, existing sessions will continue  to
>        use  the  old settings, after a dovecot reload.  Also all sessions will
>        keep alive after a dovecot stop.
>        By default all active sessions will be shut down.
> 
> According to my "dovecot -n" (see below), I have set
> "shutdown_clients=no", so "doveadm stop" should keep my open
> sessions.
> 
> But if I try this out with a simple telnet to port 143 during
> "doveadm stop", I see the following:
> 
> $ telnet imap 143
> Connected to imap.
> Escape character is '^]'.
> * OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE IDLE AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=LOGIN] Dovecot ready.
> a login user at example.com XXXXX
> a OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE IDLE SORT SORT=DISPLAY THREAD=REFERENCES THREAD=REFS THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT MULTIAPPEND URL-PARTIAL CATENATE UNSELECT CHILDREN NAMESPACE UIDPLUS LIST-EXTENDED I18NLEVEL=1 CONDSTORE QRESYNC ESEARCH ESORT SEARCHRES WITHIN CONTEXT=SEARCH LIST-STATUS BINARY MOVE QUOTA ACL RIGHTS=texk] Logged in
> * BYE Server shutting down.
> Connection closed by foreign host.
> 
> The "BYE Server shutting down." happens exactly at the time, when I
> press return after "doveadm stop", "systemctl stop dovecot", or
> "systemctl restart dovecot" in the other shell.  Only
> "systemctl reload dovecot" keeps the open sessions healthy.
> 
> So it seems that either the man page is wrong, or shutdown_clients=no
> has no effect after dovecot stop...
> 
> Greetings
> Roland
>

Are you using systemd by chance?

---
Aki Tuomi