Re: [Dovecot] Linux Bootup: Dovecot Failure

Hi again,

sorry for late response, but I was busy doing other things.

Thanks Stan, your tip fingering ntp to be the culprit was right!

After reading different FAQs on ntp and reconfiguring /etc/ntpd.conf, I just purged ntp AND ntpdate (Don't ask me why both were installed), rebootet and everything was fine. After just installing ntp and another reboot everything still was okay and now I dont have any ntpserver starting ;) I assume the installation of both ntp and ntpdate was the problem.

Thank you for your help.

Greetings, Christopher Metter

Am 24.10.2010 05:27, schrieb Stan Hoeppner:

Christopher Metter put forth on 10/23/2010 4:02 PM:

...

Hi there!

Im using a dovecot system in combination with postfix(with dovecot lda) and ldap. Till today it ran well, but before switching to live, i did some system updates and at the reboot following message occured:

Starting IMAP/POP3 mail server: dovecoUnexpected first line This is an NTP error--has nothing to do with Dovecot. Apparently you're missing a loopback interface (127.0.0.1) or you have a goofy iptables setup breaking access to the LBI. If simply the former, create a loopback interface and reboot. Problem should be solved. If the latter, find the iptables rule causing the problem and eject it.

...

(First it says: "Starting IMAP/POP3 mail server: dovecot ", but then something fails and overrides the "t" of dovecot with "Unexpected.... ") Stuff is constantly overwritten on the physical console on Linux boxen these days. This is "normal", although unsettling. Parallel daemon startup is now the default on most (all?) distros today. This allows faster startup, but it also causes errors to be reported "out of order". In your case, ntpd was started but it took a few seconds to timeout. By that time many other daemons had started up. It just happens that ntpd timed out right when Dovecot was loading, so it "appears" the error is Dovecot related, when in fact, it is not.

You can eliminate this problem by disabling parallel startup. This will fix the "out of order error reporting" but your machine will start up much more slowly, especially if have any daemons that always time out. ;) I highly recommend you _not_ disable it.

Oh, and btw, fix your ntp configuration to act as a client only, not both a client and server, and configure an external time source. Mail servers, above all others but maybe DB servers, need the clock to be accurate.