On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 11:34 -0500, Michael wrote:

Summary

After an unclean shutdown the file /var/run/dovecot/master.pid remained behind. This prevented dovecot from starting, and gave a misleading error message.

To be more resilient and fault-tolerant, I recommend that dovecot also check the validity of the PID in /var/run/dovecot/master.pid in order to determine whether or not another dovecot process is running.

It does check if a process is running with that PID. Doing any further checks to make sure that the PID is a dovecot process would probably be more trouble than worth.

Starting Dovecot Imap: Error: Dovecot is already running with PID 1965 (read from /var/run/dovecot/master.pid) Fatal: Invalid configuration in /etc/dovecot.conf

This "Invalid configuration" message is bad. Removed: http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot/rev/805d0831deb6