On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 11:59 -0500, Marc-André Joyal wrote:

Hi, I'm running Dovecot v. 0.99.14 without any problems except this one: It seems that Dovecot loses the connection with MySQl after a certain amount of time and I got this message in /var/log/maillog: Feb 19 09:37:14 localhost dovecot-auth: MySQL: Error executing query "SELECT userpassword FROM virtual_users WHERE username = 'bob'": MySQL server has gone away

I looked in the MySql docs and, by default, after 8 hours of inactivity, the Mysql server closes the connection with the client (and it's probably this that causes the error above).

So, I know that I can change the wait_timeout option in MySql but is there a way to specify an unlimited time connection only from Dovecot to MySql?

As far as I know, it's not possible. But if you upgraded to 1.0betas, Dovecot would reconnect and retry the query automatically.

And by the way, what's exactly the purpose of Dovecot's db_client_flags option? Would it be possible to specify the timeout via this option?

They're listed here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-real-connect.html

The parameter is there just in case someone would want to change it, but it's rarely wanted..