Dovecot auth process failed too early

For some reason (I don’t know what the reason is yet), my server rebooted twice a couple hours ago. Generally speaking, reboots aren’t that big a deal… journaling databases, journaling filesystems. Logs get processed and bam, everything is up.

Tonight, everything except for dovecot, the imap/pop servier, started up. The wonderfully descriptive error message that maillog provided me was that the “auth process died too early”. I’m not sure why having the auth process die later is a good thing, and I really wish there was some more detail in the log, but there wasn’t.

Googling for an error message is often a useful thing. I found an email message where running ldd (ldd /usr/libexec/dovecot/dovecot-auth) was recommended to see if something was missing. Sure enough, the FC3 dovecot was compiled expecting mysql support, and I have installed a newer mysql than what dovecot was expecting. I’m not even using mysql, but the fact that the auth program was expecting libmysqlclient.so.10 was enough to make dovecot die a cryptic death.

A symlink in /usr/lib later and dovecot is back up and running. Finally, I was able to pick up all of the latest copies of the Sober.P worm. You can never have too many, right?