OpenLDAP Server not listening on IPv6 Socket in Zimbra 8
Recently I have been experiencing a strange with an installation of the Community Edition of Zimbra Collaboration Server 8: Although all services were running, no e-mails were delivered. In the log file /var/log/zimbra.log I found messages like "zimbra amavis[9323]: (09323-01) (!!)TROUBLE in process_request: connect_to_ldap: unable to connect at (eval 111) line 152.".
The strange things about this was, that the OpenLDAP daemon (slapd) was running and answering requests. After restarting Zimbra (/etc/init.d/zimbra restart), the problem disappeared, however it reappeared after the next reboot.
After some time I figured out, that - right after the reboot - slapd was only listening on an IPv4 socket, not on an IPv6 socket. After restarting the OpenLDAP server (ldap stop && ldap start as user zimbra), the problem disappeared again and netstat showed that now slapd was also listening on the IPv6 socket.
In the end I could not figure out, why the OpenLDAP daemon would only listen on IPv4 when started during system boot but would listen on both IPv4 and IPv6 when started later. I was suspecting some problem with name resolution in the early boot process (although both the IPv4 and the IPv6 address were listed in /etc/hosts).
However, I found a work-around for the problem: By setting the local configuration option ldap_bind_url to ldap:/// (zmlocalconfig -e ldap_bind_url=ldap:///) , I could configure OpenLDAP to listen on all local interfaces, which apparently fixed the problem.