dovecot - Oct 2012 - auth timeout state=2, bad?

Hello,

we run Dovecot 2.1.7 as SASL backend for our Postfix SMTP-AUTH farm and
see this error message occasionally

Oct 22 16:15:32 lxmhs52 dovecot: auth: PLAIN(?,xx.xx.xx.xx): Request
0.21 timeouted after 150 secs, state=2

Since it is mostly the same IP repeating I'm assuming it's a client
issue. Is that correct? What could cause this? Can we safely ignore it?

Thanks,
Bernhard

On 22.10.2012, at 17.23, Bernhard Schmidt wrote:
> we run Dovecot 2.1.7 as SASL backend for our Postfix SMTP-AUTH farm and
> see this error message occasionally
> 
> Oct 22 16:15:32 lxmhs52 dovecot: auth: PLAIN(?,xx.xx.xx.xx): Request
> 0.21 timeouted after 150 secs, state=2
state 2 = "waiting for auth data from client", so what it means is
that the client sent:

AUTH PLAIN

and then just didn't do anything.
> Since it is mostly the same IP repeating I'm assuming it's a client
> issue. Is that correct? What could cause this? Can we safely ignore it?
You can safely ignore it. It should have been logged with "info" level
and only with auth_verbose=yes. Although I guess the message could be a bit
nicer. This is better I think:
http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.1/rev/49bb6cc43d03