[Dovecot] Re: Dovecot login hangs often

[P P Anwar]

OK, looks like there is a workaround for this.

First, I tried upgrading to 1.0.alpha4, but that did not fix the problem.

Then I tried to use ldap authentication directly (using
dovecot-ldap.conf under 1.0alpha4) and avoided the "pam->ldap" route,
and the hang seems to be gone.  PAM auth was disabled, and only LDAP
auth was made active.

Did not get time yet to try the "direct LDAP auth" against the dovecot
0.99.11 release (from Centos).

Anwar.


On 11/17/05, P P Anwar <anwarpp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi -
>
> We have dovecot version : 0.99.11 release : 2.EL4.1 on Centos 4.2,
> with an LDAP backend (Samba PDC) and pam set to authenticate against
> LDAP.  Dovecot is set to use pam for authentication.  It uses mbox,
> and the machine has very little load (95% idle, no memory pressure).
>
> Every 36 hours or so, no users are able to login to imap (we have only
> imap enabled).  Other services that use the same backend are working
> fine (like squid and ssh logins) even while this is happening.  So we
> are not sure if we can blame this on pam/ldap problems.
>
> When this happens, we tried a "service dovecot restart", and that
> results in saying the "address is in use".  About 10 "imap-login"
> processes seem to lurk around holding on to the imap port.  We can get
> dovecot service to start again, only after a "killall -9 imap-login".
>
> What kind of debug should we enable so that you all can diagnose this
> further ?  Any other configuration things that we should try ?   We
> prefer to stay with Redhat/Centos releases, but if this is already
> reportedly fixed in one of the later builds, we are open to trying
> one.
>
> Regards,
> Anwar.
>