So it's not dying at least at startup. Maybe an easier way would be to
make the process dump core and gdb the core file. See http://dovecot.org/bugreport.html#coredumps
I'm still not clear how one gets gdb to exec 'imap' WITH the config file.
Instead, by selectively disabling items in my dovecot.conf, I've managed to find the source of the problem.
In dovecot.conf, I have
protocol imap { ... mail_plugins = quota imap_quota acl ... plugin { ... acl = vfile:/etc/dovecot/acl_files }
With that setup, when I telnet+login as I described earlier, the connection is dropped with just this in the log.
dovecot: Jun 19 08:38:09 Error: child 9323 (imap) killed with signal 4
If I disable the acl plugin,
protocol imap { ...
- mail_plugins = quota imap_quota
- mail_plugins = quota imap_quota acl ... plugin { ...
- acl = vfile:/etc/dovecot/acl_files
- # acl = vfile:/etc/dovecot/acl_files }
and try again, the connection is no longer dropped, and I can keep testing further.
I'll see if I can figure out from the wiki what the acl problem is. But, even if my acl usage is configured wrong, some sort of error other than the 'SIGILL' would be helpful.
Thanks for the help.
-- Ben