[Dovecot] "pam_start() failed: system error" with dovecot 1.1.2, cause unknown

[Timo Sirainen]

On Sep 2, 2008, at 4:48 PM, Adam McDougall wrote:

> I would guess this is unlikely to be dovecot's fault, but I'm  
> wondering if anyone has any ideas of what might have happened based  
> on the evidence. My best guess is some kind of resource limit was  
> reached but I don't see any evidence in the logs, and the condition  
> is now gone.
>
> Suddenly this morning, one (and only one) of my dovecot servers  
> decided to start failing all logins since 08:25:04 until we  
> restarted dovecot, at which point they were working fine.  The  
> number of imap-login processes was under the limit, but there were  
> some obvious PAM errors at the time.  My account could still ssh to  
> the system so I don't think it was a problem general authentication,  
> and NIS on other systems was working fine.  No one was logged into  
> that server at the time the problems occurred, and I don't think  
> anything happened to the actual pam libraries to make them missing  
> since dovecot worked after a restart.  I should have used other  
> means to prevent people from using that dovecot instance rather than  
> stopping it, and I'll do so if it happens again in hopes of further  
> debugging.

Maybe your PAM plugins are leaking memory/fds. Have you set  
auth_worker_max_request_count to non-zero? That could help.

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