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When the new server have problems…

Eh ok, some time ago I changed mail server, from courier-imap to dovecot, as the first had problems with Apple’s Mail that’s my client of choice on OSX. Today, I started hitting problems with dovecot.
KMail started to go crazy, and at first I thought it was KMail or kio_imap4 in trouble… but when I investigated deeper, I found out the problem was dovecot, getting Out of Memory errors on the process that controlled the IMAP session.
I started looking and found it was a problem with 64-bit machines on alpha3.. ok good, I’ll try with alpha4 then. Bumped locally, but nothing, still same problem. I tried debugging it, but I was unable to get data with simple printf()s here and there. I tried gdb, but then, the program exits with correct status code, doesn’t segfault or anything, so I can’t just “wait”, and when I told it to put a breakpoint on file:line… it segfaulted. Sob. I’m not sure if the problem with gdb is that the code I want the breakpoint to is in a library..

Anyway, now I’m running a backup dovecot on Farragut, the Gentoo/FreeBSD box, after sharing the maildir via NFS. Not a clean solution, but at least it works. I’ll wait for alpha5 hoping that’s better.
I’m just wondering why this came up only today, as it was working right before 😐

Oh well… tomorrow I’ll have again a drive lesson at 19:00 so will be another day that I won’t be totally present, but at least I’m starting having a bit more confidence when I drive, so my driving license is nearer 🙂

Comments 1
  1. For memory errors of this type, I prefer using “valgrind –tool=memcheck” over gdb. It’s far easier to detect bugs that way. Maybe you can debug dovecot the same way.

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