I recently ran into the problem on one of our production servers where I was unable to start dovecot. I used the normal syntax:
[root@techedemic]# /etc/init.d/dovecot stop Stopping Dovecot Imap: [FAILED] [root@techedemic]# /etc/init.d/dovecot start Stopping Dovecot Imap: [OK] |
All seems fine, right? Wrong! When I did a ps awux | grep dovecot, the process was not running. Doing the ‘stop’ mentioned above also ‘failed’ again. So why was Dovecot not starting?
I did the following
[root@techedemic]# /etc/init.d/dovecot status dovecot dead but subsys locked |
So this meant the easy solution was just to remove the subsys file, start again and everything should be fine? Well, yes, that could be the right option (and in some cases it is, see this link for more info).
In my case though, it was simply that the /var partition on my system was out of space. My /var/log/kernel.log file was 7.4GB in size. This was because of some other IO and Journalling tests that was done on the box the day before. It turns out that if dovecot cannot append to it’s logfiles and/or the /var/mail directory cannot be written to, then it will not start.
So I just cleared out the kernel.log file, had ample free space and voilá – it started up (and remained up).
[root@techedemic]# /etc/init.d/dovecot stop Stopping Dovecot Imap: [FAILED] [root@techedemic]# /etc/init.d/dovecot start Stopping Dovecot Imap: [OK] [root@techedemic]# ps awux | grep dovecot dovecot 2782 0.0 0.0 33884 1660 ? S 07:55 0:00 pop3-login root 3249 0.0 0.0 61128 756 pts/2 S+ 07:55 0:00 grep dovecot dovecot 23385 0.0 0.0 33884 1656 ? S 07:44 0:00 pop3-login dovecot 30141 0.0 0.0 33884 1660 ? S 07:49 0:00 pop3-login root 31986 0.0 0.0 6068 532 ? Ss 07:20 0:00 /usr/sbin/dovecot root 31987 0.0 0.0 61620 1612 ? S 07:20 0:00 dovecot-auth |
So, if Dovecot, or any other program for that matter fails to start up and you are unable to find the problem, consider looking at the diskspace available to your /var/log directory. It seems it can cause havoc for some programs if you cannot log…which in a way, makes sense.
Hope this helps someone out there..
Cheers