[dovecot] Trouble setting up dovecot

[Tim Snider]

Hi,

I'm new to the list but have been trying to get dovecot configured for
the past week and a bit. I've gone through the list archives and solved
a few of my problems, but most don't seem to be addressed.

First off I want to say thanks for starting this project, I've been
hoping that someone would start an IMAP/POP server with some flexibility
in the way it's configured and provides both packages in one.I've tried
setting up Courier once and found it onerous, UW was easier but forces a
bunch of assumption that don't suit the way I wanted to configure
virtual mail.

I'd love to run dovecot, eventually with LDAP and Jamm, and Exim to
handle my virtual domains, however I'm running into a fair number of
problems and haven't had any luck getting past them.

I'm running a RedHat 7.3 SMP server, with iptables for a firewall, so
I've got several cards and thus IPs.I started out with dovecot 99.4 but
noted that it was missing the LDAP, tried 99.8-test5 and am now working
with 99.8-test7, both seem to have the same problems.

I'm currently trying to setup a IMAP server on the inside of the
firewall, 192.168.2.X. If I use just imap, turn of SSL/TLS I'm fine,
and can do plaintext authentication via shadow, but I can't get PAM
authentication working.

If I turn on SSL(ssl_disable = no), neither the imap or the imaps
respond and a netstat -tp shows that no process owns the socket
PID/process = '-', often with characters in the Recv-Q.

I've tried turning on all the debugging flags for configure on,
--with-rawlog --enable-debug --enable-asserts --with-ssl=openssl
as well as verbose_proctitle = yes, and auth_verbose = yes, setup
logfiles /var/log/dovecot/messages, yet all I get are authorization
messages. And I've noted that a number of them only show up after I've
killed the dovecot process, so I'm wondering if there needs to be a bit
of flushing somewhere?

As well I've also tried to run "dovecot -F", with the log files
commented out in the .conf file, but get nothing via stderr. I note that
when I try the log_timestamp option, the dates sent from imap-login are
completely incorrect and don't change, so I don't think the date is
being read correctly. Is log_timestamp operational?

One thing I'm not clear on is what process to run it under, I've setup a
user/group 'dovecot', but does dovecot have to be a member of wheel?
I've also noted in earlier versions you had things running via
imapd-master, but that now seems to been replaced by "dovecot", is that
correct?

Is anyone else running dovecot on a SMP system? 

Any comments or suggestions? I do have development experience, but my
Linux/UNIX programming is a bit rusty. I'd love to help make this a
rocking product, but need some help getting it dovecot up and running.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

TJ

timsn at thtree.com
http://www.thtree.com/People/TJ/Resume.html