Le 18 avr. 2021 à 08:22, Felix Zielcke <fzielcke@z-51.de> a écrit :

Am Sonntag, dem 18.04.2021 um 08:17 +0200 schrieb Jean-Daniel:
systemd don’t need pid files, and the executable must be started
without forking.


Can you show us the content fo the system dovecot.service file. As
long as it contains this line, it should be fine:

Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/dovecot -F

Just before I saw your mail, I found now a solution.

The original dovecot.service has this:

[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/dovecot -F

which according to systemd.service man page needs a sd_notify() call
from the running process. So somehow this is broken now?

I changed it to the following and now it works:

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/dovecot



I don't know that much about systemd what of forking/exec/simple would
be the best one.


The forking type exists mainly for compatibility with executables that are not able to start without forking.

When an executable as a « foreground » mode, it is usually recommended to use it instead.

The snippet I posted come from the official dovecot ubuntu distribution (from https://repo.dovecot.org) (that’s the one I’m using).