Pop3 keeps going 'dead'.. after restart its good again.

M

Mich

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Aug 29, 2007
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18
Urgent! Pop3 keeps going 'dead'.. after restart its good again.

Hi all

My e-mail is working fine, because i use IMAP. but my customers use POP3 mainly, and they are complaining that the pop3 is timingout.

i created a pop account for my self too, and yes indeed. pop3 times out.

When i restart vm-pop3d, pop is working again, but then it goes dead after 5 minutes again, (time is variable)

I looked in the exim logs, but nothing strange, are there logs for vm-pop3d ?

or does anyone know this problem
 
Last edited:
It just logs to /var/log/maillog

Errors probably go there or /var/log/messages
 
Hmm, what does this mean?

Code: 
Feb  7 12:22:09 anteros vm-pop3d[31261]: Socket closed from 80.126.51.250
Feb  7 12:22:09 anteros vm-pop3d[31262]: Socket closed from 82.92.118.26
Feb  7 12:22:09 anteros vm-pop3d[31263]: Quitting on signal: 13
Feb  7 12:22:09 anteros vm-pop3d[31264]: Socket closed from 77.251.35.23
Feb  7 12:22:09 anteros vm-pop3d[31265]: Socket closed from 77.251.35.23
Feb  7 12:22:09 anteros vm-pop3d[31266]: Socket closed from 82.173.47.34
Feb  7 12:22:18 anteros vm-pop3d[30594]: Session timed out for no user
Feb  7 12:22:18 anteros vm-pop3d[31269]: Socket closed from 80.126.51.250
Feb  7 12:22:18 anteros vm-pop3d[31270]: Socket closed from 84.245.4.85
Feb  7 12:22:18 anteros vm-pop3d[31271]: Quitting on signal: 13
Feb  7 12:22:18 anteros vm-pop3d[31272]: Quitting on signal: 13
Feb  7 12:22:18 anteros vm-pop3d[31273]: Socket closed from 77.251.35.23
Feb  7 12:22:18 anteros vm-pop3d[31274]: Socket closed from 77.251.35.23
Feb  7 12:22:18 anteros vm-pop3d[31275]: Socket closed from 84.31.162.233
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[19128]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[19317]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[19301]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[19120]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[18994]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[19454]: Socket closed from 80.126.51.250
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[18985]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[18573]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[18477]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[19456]: Socket closed from 77.251.35.23
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[18370]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[19457]: Socket closed from 77.251.35.23
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[18096]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[18015]: Quitting on signal: 15
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[19458]: Socket closed from 82.74.125.96
Feb  7 15:29:54 anteros vm-pop3d[19455]: Socket closed from 83.83.67.10
 
Similar problem here....

what os are you running?
I have basicaly the same thing happening, but every few days...
I reboot my server and email works fine again... Until???
This started just after the last DA upgrade, I am using centos
My server guy was totally off base when I brought this up, so I waited until someone else had the same problem. he suggested that it was my server config, but the problem started after the last DA upgrade, not over a year ago when the server was set up....
any help would be great!!!
Paul
 
I am running CentOS 4.x

No offence, but thank god someone else has the same problem :p haha, it confirms this did not happen because my server got pwned by some scriptkiddies earlyer.

I upgraded DA to the newest version some days ago, and now i got this problem with my email.

Does a reboot help? i havent tried that yet. im scared of rebooting because if anything fails i have to drive 200 miles to get to my server.
 
what I do...

I reboot through the DA panel under "Show Status of Services"
I find that when I detect this problem has happened I look in "Mail Queue Administration" and I see the unsent emails building up, when I reboot as above, All the email goes where it is supposed to. this only works for a while, then it has to be repeted.
 
Last edited:
Dovecot mrunning on my server already....

Dovecot is on my server already, and has been for a while prior to this problem, I think it is a DA glitch I have emailed them, they did have a few problems with the centos server this last upgrade....
 
Then what is your problem with vm-pop3d? Dovecot replaces that service.
 
I have not...

I have not specified where the problem is, it is just the same symptoms as you have, I am going to wait for reply from DA, then proceed, as I have learned that when everything works great for over a year, then only one upgrade is done, that is more than likely where the problem will be found
 
Yeah, well i installed Dovecot, waiting for the mail to fail again, if it doesnt im recommending everyone with a similar problem to install Dovecot.

I am still watching this topic for if its not fixed, or its because update of directadmin

Thanks
 
The issue with the vm-pop3d setup, apart from being a bit old is the fact that it has a hard limit with the number of child processes available.
You can increase this limit by editing your startup line in your start section of the /etc/init.d/vm-pop3d script to something like:
Code: 
vm-pop3d [B]--daemon=30[/B] -t 600
or converting vm-pop3d to use xinetd instead:
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=94

But the biggest reason we added support for dovecot was because that the old setup (vm-pop3d) uses mbox. Mbox is fine for small email accounts that get checked regularly, but because all emails are stored in 1 big inbox file, if you have many emails in the inbox, parsing can be very slow. Also, with 1 inbox file, this means it has to get locked so you can't have multiple logins to the same box at the same time. With something like /webmail, if you click too fast, if the parsing from the first request is still processing, your next click will fail (locked).

Dovecot is better in that is uses Maildir (and crazy amounts of caching/speed increases on top of that). Maildir is good because it uses 1 email per file in a directory, instead of all emails in 1 file. So there is *far* less parsing involved. This means that a) you can speed up your imap/downoads greatly: /squirrelmail /roundcube will load almost any number of emails nearly instantly (the huge dovecot caching helps too). And also, because there are many files, dovecot allows multiple simultaneous logins because there are no locks involved.

If this sounds good to you (it should) this is the conversion guide:
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=143

John
 
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