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I have a quite odd problem. At random times my dovecot daemon dies and I cannot receive/send emails while the host is still up. When trying to SSH into the server to see what happened, I discover that SSH is also dead.
After a rebooting the server everything works. I have discovered the following:
The problem is related somehow to cron.daily
and rsyslog
. By looking at several different syslog files I see the following behavior at the last lines of each syslog file:
syslog.3:
Jan 10 07:35:02 hostname anacron[11427]: Job `cron.daily' started
Jan 10 07:35:02 hostname anacron[11584]: Updated timestamp for job `cron.daily' to 2014-01-10
Jan 10 07:35:03 hostname rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="5.8.11" x-pid="1954" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] rsyslogd was HUPed
syslog.2:
Jan 11 07:35:02 hostname anacron[788]: Job `cron.daily' started
Jan 11 07:35:02 hostname anacron[901]: Updated timestamp for job `cron.daily' to 2014-01-11
Jan 11 07:35:02 hostname rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="5.8.11" x-pid="1954" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] rsyslogd was HUPed
syslog.1 (when the processes hanged):
Jan 12 07:35:01 hostname anacron[21678]: Job `cron.daily' started
Jan 12 07:35:01 hostname anacron[21806]: Updated timestamp for job `cron.daily' to 2014-01-12
It seems that right before the problem rsyslogd
was called but didn't run for some reason. Later the processes that tried to write to the syslog, such as dovecot and ssh, weren't able to do so and therefore hanged.
Do you have any suggestions how to fix this problem?
The system is running:
Linux hostname 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.41-2+deb7u2 x86_64 GNU/Linux
rsyslogd 5.8.11, compiled with:
FEATURE_REGEXP: Yes
FEATURE_LARGEFILE: No
GSSAPI Kerberos 5 support: Yes
FEATURE_DEBUG (debug build, slow code): No
32bit Atomic operations supported: Yes
64bit Atomic operations supported: Yes
Runtime Instrumentation (slow code): No
OpenSSH_6.0p1 Debian-4, OpenSSL 1.0.1e 11 Feb 2013
dovecot 2.1.7