On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 02:59:28PM +0100, Daniel Gomes wrote:
Unfortunately, I seemed to have run into a big problem on an occasion when dovecot was unable to connect my first server (gold) and hence went to the second one (extra).
I set up a simple test by configuring
hosts = 10.1.1.1 x.x.x.xwhere x.x.x.x is the real ldap server, and 10.1.1.1 is a non-existent host, and then restarted dovecot.
It took dovecot a minute or two to timeout connecting to the first one (during which time an incoming POP3 connection just waited), and then it connected to the second one and from then on authenticated happily.
This is dovecot-1.2.11 under FreeBSD 7.2
So I would suspect that your second LDAP server really is behaving differently.
Actually I forgot the obvious test: just put a single entry in your dovecot-ldap.conf, firstly hosts = gold and secondly hosts = extra, restarting dovecot after each change of course. Then see how the authentication goes. If it works consistently with one and fails consistently with the other, then clearly it's not an issue with failover.
Regards,
Brian.