If local Dovecot stops working, check lo

[Steve Litt]

Hi all,

You probably know this already, but just in case...

Let's say you have your email client getting mail from a Dovecot server
on the same computer (which is a really good way of doing things, by
the way). Then one day your email client starts saying "connection
refused" after a suitably long timeout. So then, to find out where
things are getting stuck, you do the following command:

openssl s_client -connect 127.0.0.1:993 -quiet

And you don't even get an OK back. This means it's not your username or
password, because you never even got that far. Before spending a lot of
time doing diagnostic tests and narrowing it to the root cause, try
this as root:

ifdown lo
ifup lo

A malfunctioning lo will cause Dovecot not to connect to clients. My
experience with Debian Wheezy is that lo "goes down" a lot, so this is
one of the first things I do when odd stuff happens.

HTH,

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance