Following up to myself - per an email request from a new subscriber, here's my script and crontab entry for checking and restarting dovecot on Redhat/Fedora. This catches a crashed dovecot at least once a day, sometimes several, all due to the "PRNG not seeded" thing on Fedora.

I could have just let the cron daemon email the results to root like any other cron job, but I wanted a copy to my own account. Running on a couple of hosts - MYHOST replaced with actual hostname, MY-PERSONAL@EMAIL.ADDR replaced with ... well you get the picture.

Hope it's useful, Rob

root Crontab:

## Run once every minute, always.

• • • • • /root/CronJobs/cron.chk_dovecot >/dev/null 2>&1

=============================================================================

Script: /root/CronJobs/cron.chk_dovecot

#!/bin/bash

if ! pgrep -x dovecot then if [ -f /var/lock/subsys/dovecot ]; then if rm -f /var/lock/subsys/dovecot ; then MsgRmLock="Lock file /var/lock/subsys/dovecot removed." else MsgRmLock="Unable to remove lock file /var/lock/subsys/dovecot." fi else MsgRmLock="No lock file found: /var/lock/subsys/dovecot." fi

if /etc/init.d/dovecot start; then MsgStart="Dovecot started." else MsgStart="Unable to start Dovecot." fi

if pgrep -x dovecot; then MsgRunning="Dovecot running." else MsgRunning="Dovecot not running. To restart, run (as root): /etc/init.d/dovecot start" fi

mail -s "MYHOST DOVECOT NOT RUNNING date '+%R %D'" -c root MY-PERSONAL@EMAIL.ADDR <<EoMaIl

On MYHOST, the command "pgrep -x dovecot" returned false, indicating that dovecot is not running.

Restart attempted. Results: $MsgRmLock $MsgStart $MsgRunning

EoMaIl

fi

In a message sent Fri Mar 19 13:16:52 2004, rhr-dovecot@batky-howell.com wrote:

(Sorry, just joined the list, can't reply in the original message from Feb 4.)

...

Feb 4 11:18:27 hundehuette imap-login: RAND_bytes() failed: error:24064064:random number generator:SSLEAY_RAND_BYTES:PRNG not seeded Feb 4 11:18:27 hundehuette dovecot: Login process died too early - shutting down [...]

Hi,

No idea, but I'm getting the same thing, at least once a day, sometimes several times a day. I tried putting a .rnd file in /var/libexec/dovecot, no help.

• Fedora Core 1.0

• dovecot-0.99.10-6

• openssl-0.9.7a-23

• About 20 users, using pop, pops, imap, imaps.

  I had to run a cron job that checks every minute to see if dovecot

is running, and restart it if it isn't. I'd love to get this figured out, though. I see another message about this in the list archives, at the end of January. I'll post if I find anything...

Rob