Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 436666
dovecut master.pid isn't removed on system startup, occasionally causing dovecot not to start up
Last modified: 2014-03-16 23:12:45 EDT
Description of problem: Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): initscripts-8.60-1 How reproducible: hard but explainable Steps to Reproduce: 1. crash machine, leaving it with /var/run/dovecot/master.pid 2. start machine, let /etc/rc.sysinit remove /var/run/dovecot/*/* 3. let ntp start and let it get the pid from master.pid Actual results: Error: Dovecot is already running with PID 1835 (read from /var/run/dovecot/master.pid) Fatal: Invalid configuration in /etc/dovecot.conf - which is pretty fatal if you are running an imap server... Expected results: Starting Dovecot Imap: [ OK ] Additional info: Seems to be fixed by - */dovecot) rm -f $afile/*/* ;; + */dovecot) rm -f $afile/*/* $afile/* ;;
In my case selinux seems to have prevented dovecot from killing ntp: host=localhost.localdomain type=AVC msg=audit(1205017755.529:33): avc: denied { kill } for pid=6452 comm="dovecot" capability=5 scontext=unconfined_u:system_r:dovecot_t:s0 tcontext=unconfined_u:system_r:dovecot_t:s0 tclass=capability host=localhost.localdomain type=SYSCALL msg=audit(1205017755.529:33): arch=40000003 syscall=37 success=no exit=-1 a0=72b a1=0 a2=72b a3=9970030 items=0 ppid=6451 pid=6452 auid=500 uid=0 gid=0 euid=0 suid=0 fsuid=0 egid=0 sgid=0 fsgid=0 tty=pts0 comm="dovecot" exe="/usr/sbin/dovecot" subj=unconfined_u:system_r:dovecot_t:s0 key=(null) So an alternative decription of the problem could be "dovecot kills random process when started after crash"
Seems to be solved in initscripts-8.76.2-1.i386 in Fedora 9 by using find -L /var/lock /var/run ! -type d -exec rm -f {} \;