[Dovecot] Dovecot on FC3 with Active Directory authentication

[Jeff Ramsey]

I am building an IMAP server that uses Dovecot/Sendmail on FC3 to  
replace our POP server that uses Dovecot (via POP)/Sendmail on FC2.  
My new server is authenticating users via winbind/smb against my  
WIndows 2003 Active Directory. The authentication is working great.  
The problem come up when a user gets an email and has not ever logged  
into the IMAP server via SSH, local, or GDM, therefore that user has  
no home directory.

/etc/pam.d/ssh, /etc/pam.d/login, and /etc/pam.d/gdm all have a line  
calling mkhomedir.so, which is using the /etc/skel home directory  
skeleton to create the user's home dir upon successful login,  
however, when I add that line to /etc/pam.d/dovecot, I get a  
permission denied error in /var/log/maillog. I'm assuming this is  
because dovecot is running as the user at this point, and therefore  
does not have the necessary permissions to create a folder under / 
home/DOMAIN/, which is where the home dir is supposed to be. If I  
manually create the folder, and set it's permissions, or if the user  
logs in via any of the before-mentioned methods, dovecot and sendmail  
work great.

Does anyone else run a similar setup? If so, how did you overcome  
this problem?

If not, can some Linux gurus recommend either altering the write  
permissions on the /home/DOMAIN directory, or should I try to call  
the mkhomdir app earlier in the process somehow?

Any help would be appreciated. I'm trying to make this as seamless as  
possible. Basically, I can manually create all the home dirs well  
enough, but when I add a new user to the Active Directory, it would  
be nice if this part was automated as much as possible.

Thanks,

Jeff Ramsey
MIS Administrator
Tubafor Mill, Inc.
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