dovecot - Jun 2018 - More and better logging

In general I feel there is a lack of debug and "when things go 
wrong"-logging in Dovecot (information that should perhaps be provided 
with a verbose toggle).

I was debugging problems with sasl user logins and a generic "SASL 
CRAM-MD5 authentication failed: Connection lost to authentication 
server" error in postfix, but nothing is logged in Dovecot when the 
error occurs.

After extensive debugging I finally discovered auth-penalty and 
auth_penalty_to_secs after digging in the code. I suspect this to be the 
cause, but truly I have no way of confirming this, since no log is 
provided when this is triggered? - it would be nicer if events such as 
these were simply logged for better debugging and troubleshooting.

Two cents :)

Thanks
-- 
Tom

On 25.06.2018 11:28, Tom Sommer wrote:
> In general I feel there is a lack of debug and "when things go
> wrong"-logging in Dovecot (information that should perhaps be provided
> with a verbose toggle).
>
> I was debugging problems with sasl user logins and a generic "SASL
> CRAM-MD5 authentication failed: Connection lost to authentication
> server" error in postfix, but nothing is logged in Dovecot when the
> error occurs.
>
> After extensive debugging I finally discovered auth-penalty and
> auth_penalty_to_secs after digging in the code. I suspect this to be
> the cause, but truly I have no way of confirming this, since no log is
> provided when this is triggered? - it would be nicer if events such as
> these were simply logged for better debugging and troubleshooting.
>
> Two cents :)
>
> Thanks
in v2.3.2 we introduced a framework for better debug logging, namely,
you can turn on various logging aspects with log_debug = category:<foo>

This involves adding also more debugging to various places in the code.
I'll take note of the penalty thing.

Aki