[afnog] Courier-Imapd: FAM Errors and Periodic Authentication Failures

[Brian Candler]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 12:57:34PM +0300, Begumisa Gerald M wrote:
> I'm experiencing some unexplainable behaviour where authdaemond
> periodically fails to log in to the MySQL database.  I've configured
> /usr/local/etc/authlib/authmysqlrc with the correct username and password
> that authdaemond should use when logging into the MySQL database to
> authenticate users who are attempting to access their mail from IMAP /
> POP3 clients.  Periodically, I get the following in the log files:
> 
> --
> Jan 5 11:05:12 stratus authdaemond: failed to connect to mysql server
> (server=localhost, userid=postfix): Access denied for user:
> 'postfix at localhost' (Using password: YES)
> --
> 
> This failure happens about once for every 7 times a given user accesses
> their mail.  Has anyone experienced this before?  What could be the
> problem?

Versions of all software?

Each authdaemond instance should hold open a persistent connection to the
mysql database.

So, how many authdaemond instances are you running (MAXDAEMONS in
authdaemonrc)? Does mysql have any limit as to the number of concurrent
connections it will accept?

Do you get any logs from mysql when this error occurs?

> As I was installing courier-imap from the ports, I found out that one of
> the prerequisites was the "File Alteration Monitor" system.

Personally I would remove fam completely, then rebuild courier-imap again.
Modify the port to remove the dependency if necessary.

It will detect that fam is not present, and not use it. Unfortunately Sam
has refused to provide a compile-time option which will allow the use of FAM
to be disabled as an administrative choice.

If you can find a way to fix FAM under FreeBSD, I'd be interested to see it.
But since I generally use courier-imap with NFS servers, and those servers
don't support FAM anyway, then it's better not to use it.

Regards,

Brian.