I've been SIGHUPing Dovecot when I make changes in dovecot.conf. This seemed to work fine; I made changes to the imap_listen setting and Dovecot accepted them. However, I just reset imap_listen = * and used killall instead of SIGHUP, and restarted, and Dovecot is listening on localhost. Previously, Dovecot would listen on both the LAN interface and localhost if I set imap_listen = <server name>:143 but now it listens only on the specified socket.
The reboot that changed Dovecot's behavior also changed my LDAP server. It was using CRYPT as the default without the --with-crypt flag. But after the reboot, I had to recompile OpenLADP with the --with-crypt flag. (The flag isn't mentioned in the instructions on the OpenLDAP site.)
Maybe I shouldn't have swapped keyboards during the reboot. Or maybe the keyboard uses the wrong brand of pixie dust. Or maybe I need to hit it with a hammer. Or maybe the power company flushed out some fat electrons when they cleaned the tap brushes on the dynamos...
Bob Hall