February 2005 - dovecot

[Dovecot] dovecot-auth hangs with IO leak
by Alan Tam 16 Mar '05

16 Mar '05

Hi dovecot, I am using the debian dovecot packages on a system running LDAP. My /etc/pam.d/common-* looks like this, which simply means try /etc/passwd first, and try LDAP using the same password if it is failed. account [success=1 default=ignore] pam_unix.so account required pam_ldap.so use_first_pass account required pam_permit.so auth [success=1 default=ignore] pam_unix.so auth required pam_ldap.so use_first_pass auth required pam_permit.so session [success=1 default=ignore] pam_unix.so session required pam_ldap.so use_first_pass session required pam_mkhomedir.so skel=/etc/skel umask=0002 session required pam_permit.so When many LDAP users login, /var/log/auth.log shows many (expected) error like: (note "pam_unix") Feb 3 18:16:15 eta dovecot-auth: (pam_unix) authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty= ruser= rhost=127.0.0.1 Feb 3 18:16:19 eta dovecot-auth: (pam_unix) check pass; user unknown After recent upgrades from probably 0.99.10 to 0.99.13, these lines begin to appear in /var/log/mail.log: Feb 3 16:31:00 eta dovecot-auth: Login process has too old (123s) requests, killing it. Feb 3 16:31:00 eta dovecot-auth: Login process has too old (124s) requests, killing it. And some more like this, which shows the problem: Feb 3 16:45:23 eta dovecot-auth: I/O leak: 0x8054940 (13) Feb 3 16:45:23 eta dovecot-auth: I/O leak: 0x8054940 (14) Feb 3 16:45:23 eta dovecot-auth: I/O leak: 0x8054940 (15) The problem can be solved by changing /etc/pam.d/dovecot to: auth required pam_ldap.so account required pam_ldap.so session required pam_mkhomedir.so skel=/etc/skel umask=0002 session required pam_ldap.so This change means PAM not fail auth for /etc/passwd again. I think dovecot has some problem dealing with the pam_unix + pam_ldap configuration. Do you have any idea? I am Cc-ing this message to the corresponding bug in Debian BTS. -- Regards, Alan

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[Dovecot] "not listening" notification
by Alan Tam 13 Mar '05

13 Mar '05

Hi dovecot, My dovecot log shows this: Feb 27 03:08:38 eta imap-login: Login: sltam [X.X.X.X] Feb 27 03:09:38 eta imap-login: Disconnected: Inactivity [X.X.X.X] Feb 27 03:10:32 eta dovecot: login: received another "not listening" notification (if you can't login at all, see src/lib/fdpass.c) Feb 27 03:10:42 eta dovecot-auth: Login process has too old (124s) requests, killing it. Feb 27 03:10:42 eta dovecot-auth: Login process 8 disconnected Any clues what it means? Recently I have to restart dovecot several times a day, after I have report that all users cannot login. I am running Debian sarge (2.6.8 kernel) with dovecot version 0.99.14-1 with auth_verbose and auth_debug on. -- Regards, Alan

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[Dovecot] Too many open files, etc.
by Martin Preen 07 Mar '05

07 Mar '05

Hello, a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues, but mostly the migration was ok. But I have still some questions/problems: +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ? +) we're using mbox on NFS and index files on local disks. When building the index files for the first time, it takes (of course) a long time for large folders. But we have these users, and this will happen sometimes. Is there a way to improve performance ? +) in general dovecot saves a lot of NFS-bandwidth compared to UW-imap. Thats what I was looking for. But there also seems to be a problem with large inboxes (> 10 MB) and/or large attachments. Is this right ? One user currently gets this error from Pine when accessing a large attachment: MAIL FOLDER "INBOX" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR. AFAIK this error is related to some timeout problem. Has anyone seen this (and a solution for it) ? Thanks. Martin ----------------------------------------------------------------- Martin Preen, Universitaet Freiburg, Institut fuer Informatik Georges-Koehler-Allee, Geb.52, Zi.00-006, 79110 Freiburg, Germany phone: ++49 761 203-8250 preen(a)informatik.uni-freiburg.de fax: ++49 761 203-8242 www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de

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[Dovecot] fd_send broken pipe
by Mike Foley 05 Mar '05

05 Mar '05

Hi, I'm trying to move from UW-IMAP to Dovecot. This is on a RedHat 7.3 system and I'm using the Dovecot RPM from Dag Weirs site. dovecot-0.99.13-1.0.rh7.rf.i386.rpm http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/dag/redhat/7.3/i386/dovecot-0.99.13-1.0.rh7.rf… When I start up Dovecot, I get the following: dovecot: Dovecot starting up Feb 28 01:41:54 yelofsrv dovecot: Auth process died too early - shutting down Feb 28 01:41:54 yelofsrv dovecot: child 13724 (auth) returned error 127 Feb 28 01:41:54 yelofsrv imap-login: fd_send(-1) failed: Broken pipe I'm just trying to do a simple PAM/passwd type login. No MySQL/LDAP/PGSQL stuff. I've Googled till the cows came home (almost literally. I was up till 2am last night searching) and can't seem to find a straight answer. Any help/pointers? thanks, mike

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[Dovecot] Dovecot response to "FETCH" command
by Alex Tang 04 Mar '05

04 Mar '05

Hi folks. I just converted my site from UW+mbox to dovecot+maildir (stable-test59, 2005/02/25). For the most part, everything is great. The server seems faster and less memory intense than the UW server (this part has made me very happy). And it's definitely more user friendly to me than Courier. There is one thing however... A few of my users are using the web based mail reader (Squirrelmail-1.2.11) that i provide for them. Once i converted to dovecot, the squirrelmail users were reporting that when viewing the folder list page, 2 things were happening: * The date for all of the messages was being displayed as "Sun 4:00 pm" * all messages were shown as being "new". they never would be transferred into the "Seen" state. After doing some IMAP protocol sniffing, i found this difference in the way that the UW server and the dovecot server handles the "FETCH" command... Squirrelmail issues a FETCH command to get message header information like this (lines broken with backslashes for readability): A009 FETCH 1:1 (FLAGS RFC822.SIZE INTERNALDATE BODY.PEEK \ [HEADER.FIELDS (Date To From Cc Subject X-Priority \ Content-Type)]) The UW server returns: * 1 FETCH (FLAGS () RFC822.SIZE 710 \ INTERNALDATE "27-Feb-2005 23:50:42 -0800" \ BODY[HEADER.FIELDS ("DATE" "TO" "FROM" "CC" "SUBJECT" \ "X-PRIORITY" "CONTENT-TYPE")] {153} Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 23:50:42 -0800 From: root <root(a)scorchedearth.us.proofpoint.com> To: altitude(a)scorchedearth.us.proofpoint.com Subject: asdf When the same FETCH response is returned by dovecot, the response looks like this: FLAGS () RFC822.SIZE 3358 INTERNALDATE "27-Feb-2005 07:55:27 -0800") * 1 FETCH (BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (DATE TO FROM CC SUBJECT X-PRIORITY CONTENT-TYPE)] {205} Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:04:22 +0800 From: xxx xxx <xxx(a)xxx.com> To: dovecot(a)dovecot.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Subject: [Dovecot] "not listening" notification I noticed that in the UW response, the "* 1 FETCH ..." is the first line, and contains all of the data except for the message header info. However, in the dovecot response, the data is split into 2 lines, and the first line is not the "* 1 FETCH" line. In reading through the squirrelmail source, squirrelmail is not recognizing this as a valid response, and thus the date, size, and flags are not being properly set in the internal squirrelmail message objects. This explains why both the date as well as the "seen" status of the message is never properly set. OK, after all this blabbing on...here's my question. Is the data being sent back by dovecot a valid response? My knowledge of the IMAP protocol is weak to say the least. I tried reading the IMAP RFC (3501), in particular section 6.4.5 which defines the FETCH command), and the RFC seems to specify that the response should have the "* # FETCH" lines come first. However, the RFC seems vague, and i didn't wade through any of the other RFCs out there. I figure it is legal, since the two other clients i've used seem to understand it just fine (thunderbird/mozilla, mutt). However, could this be the reason why mozilla/thunderbird sometimes gets the message size wrong (and hence why the "tb-negative-fetch" workaround is needed). For now, i'll bang on squirrelmail to support the response sent by dovecot. Thanks. ...alex...

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[Dovecot] Newby Question
by Troy Bull 03 Mar '05

03 Mar '05

Hello I just setup my IMAP server and everything works great, except for 1 small detail. I am upgrading from uwashington's imap server, and in theirs I had to put a directory "mail" in for the imap folder (this is on the client). The problem I have is with dovecot this makes an extra level (I think). So on my server ~/mail is where the mail folder is located, but when the client puts in the "mail" for the imap server directory dovecot looks in and creates folders in ~/.mail/mail. This is a problem for me because I have many clients and I would have to go reconfigure each one. My question is this, is there a way to make dovecot look in ~/ so that when combined with the imap folder from the client it ends up in ~/mail? I hope that is clear enough, I was thinking maybe I need to set default_mail_env, but i have no idea to what? Thanks in advance Troy

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[Dovecot] Trigger getmail via mail-client action?
by Gert Brinkmann 03 Mar '05

03 Mar '05

Hello, I want to use dovecot on my private debian/unstable-system to have the advantages of an IMAP-Server (Access to mails from different computers, Simply changing the mail client). I decided to use dovecot, because I very often have read (in the web) that it should be more simple to configure than other servers. Now I have the following question: I want to use getmail to retrieve mails from my provider's pop3-server. I do have a dial-up-connection that is not online permanently (I do not have a flat rate). I could start a script on ppp's ip-up that periodically invokes getmail and on ip-down to kill it again. But I would prefer to invoke getmail only when I really want it to be run. The ideal solution for me was to invoke getmail when the "Get Mail"-Button of the mail client is pressed. Is this possible? Perhaps there is something like a connection- or refresh-trigger in dovecot? Thank you, Gert

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Re: [Dovecot] Too many open files, etc.
by Remy Zandwijk 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

> a few days ago I switched out UW-server installation to > dovecot 0.99.14 (Solaris 9). There were a few client issues, > but mostly the migration was ok. > > But I have still some questions/problems: > > +) dovecot-auth: ... PAM: pipe() failed: Too many open files > I increased the max. number of open files. Is this normal > behaviour, that more than 512 open files are needed ? Martin, we're dealing with the same problem right now. We are using dovecot 1.0 stable and we migrated last weekend. 32-bit processes in Solaris 9 have 256 filedescriptors avail- able. This seems a bit to small. Using this command to get the number of file descriptors used by dovecot: ls -1 /proc/`cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid`/fd | wc In our enviroment this is currently around 390. You can limit the number of file descriptors per process in Solaris 9. After starting Dovecot, we issued the command: plimit -n 8192,8192 `cat /var/run/dovecot/master.pid` This gives Dovecot 8192 filedescriptors. HTH, Remy

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[Dovecot] UID inserted in the middle of mailbox
by Nicolas STRANSKY 28 Feb '05

28 Feb '05

I'm seeing these with latest 1.0-stable : Feb 27 16:48:12 zamok dovecot: POP3(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /var/mail/**** (176 > 150) Feb 27 16:49:58 zamok dovecot: POP3(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /var/mail/**** (4409 > 4237) Feb 27 16:50:04 zamok dovecot: IMAP(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /var/mail/**** (7122 > 5116) Feb 27 16:50:16 zamok dovecot: IMAP(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /home/****/Mail/trash (15571 > 14535) Feb 27 16:50:16 zamok dovecot: IMAP(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /home/****/Mail/trash (16578 > 14535) Feb 27 16:50:19 zamok dovecot: IMAP(****): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /var/mail/**** (23318 > 13713) -- Nico L'étude approfondie de la nature est la source la plus féconde des découvertes mathématiques. -+- Joseph Fourier -+-

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[Dovecot] Protect some mailbox to remove
by FireFly 25 Feb '05

25 Feb '05

I've installed dovecot 0.99.14 (maildir, postfix, RHEL3) and I would like to create , for every user, 4 mailbox (in skel): mail-sent, spam, virus-alert and sysadm. Procmail, parsing header mail, will move mails into a specific mailbox. Every users could move, delete, read these mails but they must not delete mailbox folder (such as INBOX mail). Thanks in advance, Francesco __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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