[Dovecot] BUG REPORT - Stops logging after sleep

[Bill Cole]

At 7:04 AM -0400 5/11/07, Bruce Bodger  imposed structure on a stream 
of electrons, yielding:
>It appears as though dovecot doesn't like syslogd being restarted.

That's probably not it.

The whole point of syslog is for individual message sources (e.g. 
dovecot) to not have to worry about where the messages go.

This is actually at least partly a bug in the MacOS X syslog 
implementation. With 10.4, Apple decided that neither traditional BSD 
syslog or syslog-ng was what they wanted, so they reimplemented from 
the ground up and did a lousy job.

>My system.log is rotated nightly followed by a pretty standard 
>syslogd restart...
>
>if [ -f /var/run/syslog.pid ]; then kill -HUP $(cat 
>/var/run/syslog.pid | head -1);

That's not a restart, it is a 'hangup' signal that will make a normal 
syslogd reread the config file. The problem with that is that when 
you do it, Apple's syslogd completely stops logging. I'm not sure why 
that is, but I've been working around it since the 10.4 release and 
Apple has had a bug report for that long.

If you actually kill syslogd with a TERM or KILL signal it will be 
restarted by launchd and it should log properly.


>It appears from that point on dovecot no longer writes to mail.log.


Dovecot was never writing to mail.log. Syslogd was, and it was broken.

>Killing and restarting dovecot causes it to write to the log again.

That's a bit surprising, since if you are using syslog, the dovecot 
processes don't know anything about the specific log files that 
syslog  is using. The implication of what you are seeing is that the 
breakage is between dovecot and syslogd, and that restarting dovecot 
fixes it.



-- 
Bill Cole                                  
bill at scconsult.com