Daniel Lange's blog

We're currently installing a solution including dovecot for a company to go into production in April. So we kick this off with a development box for integrating parts that different suppliers to our customer are working on.

But after installing dovecot on the new joint development machine it just didn't start. It worked on our local development boxes but the install for the customer has been scripted with (what we call) "poor man's puppet" so it is somewhat hard to compare the setups. Same Ubuntu 14.04 LTS under the hood but on top of that things (like config layout, directory structures etc.) are quite different.

Back on topic: ps aux | grep d[o]ve returned empty.

Looking at /var/log/mail.log did not show anything relevant.

But syslog (/var/log/syslog) had some worrying lines like:

Mar 16 03:16:17 dev-new kernel: [ 3222.339365] doveconf[6420]: segfault at 200 ip 00007fa041b25a03 sp 00007ffe7881e070 error 4 in libc-2.19.so[7fa041ada000+1bb000]

Manually running the daemon resulted in:

# /usr/sbin/dovecot -F -c /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
Segmentation fault

So

mkdir /var/core
chmod 1777 /var/core
echo "/var/core/%p" > /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
ulimit -c unlimited
/usr/sbin/dovecot -F -c /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Better. We have a core file now.

But: