FIXED: Courier IMAP: "malloc: Input/output error"

[Chris Boot <bootc@bootc.net>]

Chris Boot wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I have only just recently started receiving the following errors in my 
> mail server's mail and system logs:
>
> Apr  5 15:11:38 tarquin.lan imapd-ssl: malloc: Input/output error
> Apr  5 15:11:38 tarquin.lan imapd-ssl: malloc: Input/output error
>
> This is repeated a lot, but only appears for imapd-ssl and no other 
> process. Note that I'm only allowing outside IMAP connections over 
> SSL, so this may also happen for imapd, but since it's hardly ever 
> used it's not causing errors.
>
> At first it could be my swap partitions failing but nothing else seems 
> to be going wrong and 'badblocks -vw' can't find a thing...
>
> I'm using a virtual domains setup, so all of my users' mail is stored 
> and accessed using the 'vmail' account on my system. Some googling 
> found someone thinking it could be about ulimits, and another post on 
> the Courier mailing list, but couldn't find answers to either...
>
> I'm using a homebuilt kernel 2.6.11.5 with grsec. The system has 
> plenty of free memory and a humongous amount of free swap...
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Many thanks,
> Chris
Hi all,

For the list archives: I think I've fixed the problem. It's only been 
running for a few minutes now, but I haven't got any of these so it 
should be OK.

The problem was that portmap had died some time ago, and I had restarted 
it. However, fam (that Courier IMAP uses to check for new files) hadn't 
registered with the new portmap instance and was giving me the rather 
misleading 'malloc: Input/output error'. I restarted fam and it seems to 
be running fine now. Go figure.

Hope this helps someone in the future!

Chris

--
Chris Boot
bootc@bootc.net
http://www.bootc.net/