dovecot - Jan 2009 - Killing Dovect, an unpleasant surprise

When it came time to upgrade DC or replace the certificate, I would find 
the root instance of dovecot and do a kill -7 of it.  Within 20-30 
seconds, all the hundreds of DC related processes would go away, I would 
swap the executable or certificate/key and restart DC.  Very clean and 
quick.

Surprise.  After switching from 1.0.15 to 1.1.8 and doing the kill, I 
found that all the imap-login instances had been inherited by the root 
(1) process and did not go away.
Yikes! An Unpleasant Surprise.
So instead of being down for a minute, I was out for a much more 
noticeable 5-7 minutes, while I QUICK did an awk of the ps list to give 
me the pids and then xarg killed them.  My boss asked me if this was a 
pink slip notice. :(

Is this The Way Things Will Be?  Is there a new way to kill everything 
DC related quickly and cleanly?
-- 
==== Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources 
Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 
sdean at bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035 "Resolve then, 
that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts on 
tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he 
may be us."
=== From the introduction to the original Pogo Papers

On Jan 28, 2009, at 12:17 PM, Stewart Dean wrote:
> Surprise.  After switching from 1.0.15 to 1.1.8 and doing the kill,  
> I found that all the imap-login instances had been inherited by the  
> root (1) process and did not go away.
> Yikes! An Unpleasant Surprise.
> So instead of being down for a minute, I was out for a much more  
> noticeable 5-7 minutes, while I QUICK did an awk of the ps list to  
> give me the pids and then xarg killed them.  My boss asked me if  
> this was a pink slip notice. :(
>
> Is this The Way Things Will Be?  Is there a new way to kill  
> everything DC related quickly and cleanly?
Can you reproduce this on a test system? They should go away  
immediately.