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Sure,
<br />
<br />Its probably just typical hacker activity.
<br />
<br />If you look at a list of processes, you'll see dozens or even hundreds of "dovecot-auth" and "pop3-login" in the list. Its someone running a password guessing program against your server trying to find weak passwords so they can exploit an account. After a while, their script has eaten up all the memory for dovecot and you get this type of "denial-of-service" problem.
<br />
<br />I'm sure the guys who have set up dfix and have it helping with that problem can give you a hand. I haven't done that myself, so I can't say how.
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Chuck
<br />
<br /><font size="2">
<br />
<br /><b>---------- Original Message
-----------</b>
<br />
From: "Gregg" <greggk1@cox.net>
<br />
To: "'BlueOnyx General Mailing List'" <blueonyx@blueonyx.it>
<br />
Sent: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:48:35 -0700
<br />
Subject: [BlueOnyx:02233] Dovecot issues?
<br />
<br />> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Hello,<o:p /></span>
<br />> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Recently I have noticed in the mail lot a lot of weird
errors.<o:p /></span>
<br />> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"><o:p>
</o:p></span>
<br />> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">dovecot: pop3-login: Can't connect to auth server at
default:
Too many open
files<o:p /></span>
<br />> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">dovecot: imap-login: socket(default) failed: Too many open
files<o:p /></span>
<br />> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"><o:p>
</o:p></span>
<br />> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">I do not have that many users on this particular server,
and
it's not that busy. I have to manually restart dovecot, and all is back
to
normal.<o:p /></span>
<br />> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Has someone else experienced this? What could be causing it?
Any
suggestions is
appreciated.<o:p /></span>
<br />> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);"><o:p>
</o:p></span>
<br />> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">Gregg<o:p /></span>
<br /><b>------- End of Original Message
-------</b>
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