I've just installed Dovecot 0.99.12.1 onto a White Box EL 3 server. I'm mostly following the email server setup instructions at http://www.wanderingbarque.com/mailserver.html and getting Dovecot to work is the last task to complete.

I've compiled Dovecot with LDAP support. I'm authenticating Postfix via SASL to the LDAP database just fine, and I also authenticate and manipulate LDAP info from JAMM very well, too. However, Dovecot authentication seem to hang up when a correct password is submitted (POP or IMAP... it doesn't matter).

Here's an example of the problem:

[root@kayak /etc] telnet localhost 110 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost.bramble.com (127.0.0.1). Escape character is '^]'. +OK dovecot ready. user repetty@bizzy.mine.nu +OK pass bogeybogey

sadf hello? ^]

telnet> q Connection closed.

As you can see, once I hit the return key to submit the password I do not get another prompt. In fact, Dovecot doesn't respond at all although it seems to respond to the escape character just fine.

Additionally, dovecot-auth starts soaking up CPU time... until I kill the process (dovecot-auth must be killed manually.)

22:15:32 up 32 days, 21:40, 5 users, load average: 1.05, 1.02, 0.98 121 processes: 119 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle total 50.5% 0.0% 0.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 48.8% cpu00 66.7% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 33.2% cpu01 34.4% 0.0% 1.1% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 64.3% Mem: 318260k av, 300740k used, 17520k free, 0k shrd,
24380k buff 141540k actv, 28364k in_d, 3864k in_c Swap: 655352k av, 80868k used, 574484k free
94736k cached

PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND

23846 dovecot 25 0 1928 1928 1352 R 49.7 0.6 27:30 0 dovecot-auth 23847 dovecot 15 0 1072 1072 868 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 1 imap-login 23848 dovecot 15 0 1072 1072 868 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 1 imap-login 23849 dovecot 15 0 1160 1160 936 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 1 imap-login 23850 dovecot 15 0 1136 1136 928 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 0 pop3-login 23851 dovecot 15 0 1140 1140 928 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 1 pop3-login 23852 dovecot 15 0 1140 1140 928 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 0 pop3-login 23858 dovecot 15 0 1068 1068 868 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 0 imap-login 23870 dovecot 15 0 1064 1064 864 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 1 pop3-login 23886 dovecot 15 0 1060 1060 864 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 1 pop3-login 23916 dovecot 15 0 1064 1064 864 S 0.0 0.3 0:00 0 pop3-login

From the client's point of view, the server never seems to come back after the account password is submitted. Dovecot's log shows that it eventually times out the client, although the client never seems to get wind of this:

pop3-login: Dec 19 22:13:08 Info: Disconnected: Inactivity [192.168.0.6]

I know that Dovecot is connecting to the LDAP server because if I mess up the Dovecot LDAP password in the dovecot.conf file I get an authentication error (as I should):

dovecot-auth: Dec 19 20:52:19 Error: LDAP: ldap_simple_bind_s() failed (dn cn=dovecot,dc=dillo,dc=info): Invalid credentials

Again, if client submits an incorrect email account password everything works as it should: Dovecot tells the client that the password is incorrect, over and over, if necessary. However, if the password is entered correctly then Dovecot hangs up for good.

--Richard