The version I was running was 1.0-rc15 from Redhat 5. I'm not sure how many dovecot -auth processes were spawed. We upgraded to dovecot 1.0.10 and our problem was solved. Unfortunately, this problem happened on a live system and we can not put back the older version. It would appear that somwhere between these version the problem got resolved.
Harrison Metzger
On Jan 9, 2008 10:16 PM, Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi wrote:
On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 09:42 -0600, Harrison Metzger wrote:
Hello,
I have dovecot installed and it works for about 3 hours then I get this error (in /var/log/maillog):
Jan 8 08:42:53 stu dovecot: auth(default): pam(grossmsm,69.131.100.47): pipe() failed: Too many open files
I set pam_limits.so to allow the user 'dovecot' to have 8192 open files, and I also changed:
dovecot-auth isn't (or shouldn't!) be running as "dovecot" user. See http://wiki.dovecot.org/UserIds. Also I don't think pam_limits settings matter for dovecot-auth, since it's started by dovecot master which was started as root, and PAM is never called in the middle. So the only thing that affects number of fds is "ulimit -n" value before dovecot was started.
What Dovecot version are you using? How many dovecot-auth processes do you have running after a while?