When it came time to upgrade DC or replace the certificate, I would find the root instance of dovecot and do a kill -7 of it. Within 20-30 seconds, all the hundreds of DC related processes would go away, I would swap the executable or certificate/key and restart DC. Very clean and quick.
Surprise. After switching from 1.0.15 to 1.1.8 and doing the kill, I found that all the imap-login instances had been inherited by the root (1) process and did not go away. Yikes! An Unpleasant Surprise. So instead of being down for a minute, I was out for a much more noticeable 5-7 minutes, while I QUICK did an awk of the ps list to give me the pids and then xarg killed them. My boss asked me if this was a pink slip notice. :(
Is this The Way Things Will Be? Is there a new way to kill everything DC related quickly and cleanly?
==== Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 sdean@bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035 "Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us." === From the introduction to the original Pogo Papers