On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 13:04, Clive Jones wrote:
Is there a way to make Dovecot maintain a pid file? Most daemons put their pid in /var/run/dovecot.pid (or similar) while they are running, then remove it on exit, but I can't find any option to do this in Dovecot.
Hmm. I guess I could add it.
(Of course, if I could work out how on earth to stop Dovecot leaking processes, I wouldn't be looking for a simpler way to keep bringing the daemon down and restarting it. (-8 )
Well, I thought you would have looked at 0.99.10.4 release announcement mail:
- Fixed reference counters in imap-login and pop3-login.
IMAP AUTHENTICATE and POP3 AUTH commands could have left the
process stuck doing nothing forever.I'd think it fixes your problem.
Also last night I started thinking about this problem in general and figured out that manual reference counting is a bad idea. Either you unref too much and cause double-free() security holes, or you forget to unref something and it can be used to DoS like in this case.
Garbage collector would help .. but I don't really like the idea of depending on Boehm GC. It's bloaty and I haven't had very good experiences with it so far. I couldn't figure out why it's incorrectly freeing some part of memory when running THREAD command and causing crashes.
So.. I haven't fully finished my plan, but I think it would work if I made some kind of GC for "objects". There would be just a few of them, mostly where I use refcounting now. It would be fully ANSI-C and it might not be as easy to use as real GC, but I think I could make it safe so these kind of security holes would be prevented.