This afternoon the maillog showed some wierd issues, and I could not get the mail through the POP3 server.

pam(dennis,192.16x.x.xx): PAM child process 7842 timed out, killing it
wb dovecot: auth(default): pam(dennis,192.16x.x.xx): Child process died
wb dovecot: auth(default): PAM: Child 7842 died with signal 9

Took me some time to find out that I had to recover a ‘database’ ? Finally this is the solution (CentOS / Bluequartz)

service dovecot stop
service xinetd stop
service admserv stop
killall -9 dovecot-auth
/etc/rc.d/init.d/dbrecover start
service admserv start
service xinetd start
service dovecot start