[Dovecot] Login user doesn't exist: dovecot

[Chris Wakelin]

Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Thursday 19 Jan 2006 11:14, Simon Waters wrote:
>> On Thursday 19 Jan 2006 11:06, Anne Wilson wrote:
>>> Login user doesn't exist: dovecot
>>>
>>> Advice, please?
>> The users are created by Debian when it installs the package, because
>> the package maintainer takes care of these details.
>>
>> If you build from source you'll need to add the relevant users, using
>> "adduser" as per the documentation.
> 
> That makes sense.  When I compiled the alpha release it was to update an 
> already installed 0.99.14, so the user would have been there.
> 
> Now - could you please point me at the documentation for this?  I 
> thought I had grabbed all relevant docs, but I seem to have missed 
> something.  Chris says that it should be "an unprivileged local user", 
> but I'm unclear exactly what that implies - in exactly how it differs 
> from a normal user.  I need the details, such as whether it needs 
> specific UID, group, or password.
> 
> From your reply I'm sure this must all be documented somewhere, but 
> where?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Anne

The uid doesn't matter, Dovecot just wants a dedicated user account
together with a group, typically called "dovecot" that isn't used for
anything else (and ideally shouldn't even have a shell or password).

The Dovecot RPM sets this up with

groupadd -g 96 -r dovecot
useradd -d /var/run/dovecot -s /bin/false -g dovecot -M -r -u 96 dovecot

(you might need "-m" instead of "-M"; my useradd seems to need this).
This assumes nothing else is using UID 96 or GID 96.

Chris

-- 
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Christopher Wakelin,                           c.d.wakelin at reading.ac.uk
IT Services Centre, The University of Reading,  Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK              Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094