[Dovecot] Wait for interface to become available instead of dying?

[Sebastian Arcus]

On 10/06/13 13:14, Reindl Harald wrote:
>
> Am 10.06.2013 11:45, schrieb Sebastian Arcus:
>> At the moment, if one of the interfaces specified with "listen=" in dovecot.conf is not up when Dovecot is started,
>> then Dovecot just refuses to start. Is there an option to make Dovecot start anyway, and just use the interface
>> when it becomes available? It is inconvenient to have Dovecot refuse to start during boot because some interface is
>> temporarily not available.
>>
>> Then again, maybe there is some strong security reasoning behind the way Dovecot behaves at the moment?
>
> the main question is why do you not order the start of your services correctly
> how should a application bind to a specific interface if it is not up?

The order of services is fine as it is. The problem is that if any of 
the interfaces Dovecot is supposed to be binding to is missing, Dovecot 
seems to refuse to start at all - instead of just binding to what is 
available. The openvpn service for example might have been reconfigured 
on a different IP. On next reboot, there is no imap server available for 
any interface. One of the network cards might go faulty. On next reboot 
- not imap server.

Exim seems to be happy to start regardless of what is available - but 
I'm not sure of the intricacies of how they do it.