dovecot - Jul 2005 - Can't connect to auth server

I've been seeing these errors intermittently for a while now.  Here's an
example from the logs:

dovecot: Jul 12 15:59:05 Error: imap-login: Can't connect to auth server
at default: Resource temporarily unavailable

The error is EAGAIN.  Sometimes it will resolve itself after a few
minutes and sometimes it needs to be restarted (it may fix itself,
I usually get a phone call if it goes on for very long).  I've looked
while the problem is occuring and dovecot and dovecot-auth don't have
an excessive number of file descriptors open, maybe 10 or 20.

Any ideas or anything else to look at?  The system is SuSE Linux 9.2
running kernel 2.6.x.  We have seen some odd things happen with these
systems, so it is possible that it is not dovecot.  The kernel doesn't
log anything unusual and other processes seem happy.

Todd

On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 18:44 -0400, Todd Burroughs wrote:
> dovecot: Jul 12 15:59:05 Error: imap-login: Can't connect to auth
server
> at default: Resource temporarily unavailable
> 
> The error is EAGAIN.  Sometimes it will resolve itself after a few
> minutes and sometimes it needs to be restarted (it may fix itself,
> I usually get a phone call if it goes on for very long).  I've looked
> while the problem is occuring and dovecot and dovecot-auth don't have
> an excessive number of file descriptors open, maybe 10 or 20.
> 
> Any ideas or anything else to look at?  The system is SuSE Linux 9.2
> running kernel 2.6.x.  We have seen some odd things happen with these
> systems, so it is possible that it is not dovecot.  The kernel doesn't
> log anything unusual and other processes seem happy.
Well, what fails is connect() to UNIX socket. connect()'s man page says:

       EAGAIN No  more free local ports or insufficient entries in the routing
              cache. For PF_INET see the  net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range  sysctl
              in ip(7) on how to increase the number of local ports.

UNIX sockets don't allocate local ports, so maybe it has something to do
with routing or firewall?

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