[Dovecot] Three oddities

[Bob Hall]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 06:11:59AM +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 00:11, Bob Hall wrote:
> > > What userdb are you using? Dovecot gets the uid/gid for users from
> > 
> > The userdb is ldap. What are the uid and gid supposed to do?
> 
> imap process is run under them. Actually after reading your mail, it
> feels like you haven't even noticed their existence? :)

In the paragraph you quote below, I described setting the global and 
individual uids and gids, so I must have been aware of their existence.  
I thought they were being used to set permissions, but you explain 
otherwise below.
 
> > I have 
> > the default uid in dovecot-ldap.conf and the individual uidNumber and 
> > values in the LDAP registry set to the mail account (the one I want to own 
> > the mail files). The default gid and the individual gidNumbers are set 
> > to the mail group, which is the group assigned to all files in /var/mail. 
> 
> Sounds correct then. Did you verify with ps that the imap processes are
> also running under that user? Are you sure the full /var/mail/etc path
> is accessible to that user?

The main dovecot process runs under root. If I understand correctly, 
it forks subprocesses (imap) that run under the user. These never show 
up in ps. Is there a way to capture a transitory process in ps? My 
Dovecot installation is currently hosed, so the imap processes may not 
be spawning.
 
> > If the mail account owns the files, users can't access them. If I own 
> > the files, everthing works fine, but my uid and gid numbers are not listed 
> > anywhere that dovecot has access to.
> 
> Well, that sounds weird. It's sounds like it's still running the imap
> processes under your uid?

Yea. How do I check that, if imap never shows up in ps? 
 
> > I know that imap-master checks uids 
> > and gids for validity, but aside from that I don't know what they're used 
> > for.
> 
> They're just extra checks.

Just validity checks? OK, that makes sense.
 
> > I thought that maybe the fact that I'm a wheel and the mail user is not
> > had something to do with it,
> 
> No, and actually Dovecot drops the wheel group permissions if you happen
> to belong to it :)
> 
> > I think you're at a point where you need to think about how you are 
> > going to explain Dovecot to users.
> 
> Yea .. I should write some simple to read installation manual.
> 
> > > > 2)
> > > > The Macs have Eudora 4.2 installed, and the Win boxes have Eudora 5.1. 
> > > > The Macs can delete mail, put it in the trash, and empty the trash. 
> > > > The Win clients can mark mail deleted, but they can't remove it. The 
> > > > mail stays in the IMAP folder until the same user accesses their mail 
> > > > from a Mac and deletes it. If a user drags a message to another folder, 
> > > > a copy is created in the new folder but the old copy remains in the 
> > > > original folder. I'm not having this problem with Mutt, so it the 
> > > > problem seems to be specific to the Windows verson of Eudora. Is there 
> > > > a fix?
> > > 
> > > Are there error messages in log file? /var/log/maillog probably. I can't
> > > think of any reason why it does that..
> > 
> > No. Nothing in maillog,
> 
> But there's "Dovecot starting up" message anyway?

Yes.
 
> > and nothing in dovecot.rawlog. That's something 
> > else I'm confused about: When exactly does Dovecot write to the raw logs? 
> > I've got a boatload of entries from 20030814, and nothing before or since. 
> 
> They're written to immediately. If you're not seeing them, there's two
> possibilities: dovecot.rawlog isn't located in user's home directory (or
> the home directory isn't given at all), or it doesn't have permissions
> to write there.

I've got it in my home directory, and it's listed in homeDirectory in the 
ldap registry. I made dovecot.rawlog world writable. Nothing is showing up.
 
> > Also, I get the following in the output from "ps waux | grep dovecot":
> > 
> > dovecot       1004  0.0  0.9  2208  536  ??  S     7:58AM   0:01.48 imap-login:
> > imap-login [IP address] (imap-login)
> > 
> > The machine at [IP address] is physically shut down. Should there still 
> > be an imap-login process for it?
> 
> Hmm. Not really. Check with strace -p what it's doing?

I'll try that as soon as I un-hose Dovecot.

Bob Hall