Re: Dovecot 2.4 LMTP socket for Postfix / Dovecot base_dir not created upon restart

> On 24/02/2026 00:57 EET Philip Iezzi via dovecot <[email protected]> wrote:
>

<snip/>
 
>  
> But, when using an absolute path on unix_listener, upgrade step 2) Bullseye=>Bookworm breaks with:
> 
> Processing triggers for dovecot-core (2:2.4.2-2+debian12) ...
> Job for dovecot.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
> (...)
> dovecot[34446]: master: Error: service(lmtp): Socket already exists: /var/run/dovecot/lmtp
> dovecot[34446]: master: Fatal: Failed to start listeners
> 
> I then moved to `unix_listener lmtp`:
> 
> service lmtp {
>   unix_listener lmtp {
>     mode = 0666
>     user = postfix
>     group = postfix
>   }
> }
> 
> Bookworm upgrade (restarted from scratch with a fresh server clone) went through fine.
> But even after several dovecot.service restarts, the socket ended up in /run/lmtp without creating the /run/dovecot directory, and after a full system reboot, it was suddenly back where I have expected it: /run/dovecot/lmtp
> I never changed base_dir, which defaults to /var/run/dovecot/
> 

On most modern operating systems, /var/run and /run are the same. So unless you touched something, dovecot should always use /run/dovecot. Not sure what happened there, but I suspect you accidentically changed something.

Aki

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