[Dovecot] Userdb and home directories

[Chris Wakelin]

Mike Brudenell wrote:
> Greetings -
> 
> A lot of reading and testing has led me part-way to an answer.  If
> anyone can help me get all the way there I'll be really grateful: I only
> have 48 hours now before the system has to go live!
> 
> The problem...
> 
> We are using "userdb passwd" to get a user's details from our main NIS
> map.  This returns uid, gid and normal home directory for each user.
> 
> However for mail I don't make any use of the home directory, wanting a
> "sealed black box" environment that isn't dependent on our other file
> server with home directories on it: just the file server with the mail
> directories.

We use the NIS passwd map to generate a static passwd-file userdb
overnight (which only takes a few seconds), which we use for uid and gid
but override the home directory with the directory containing their
mbox. This appears to give much better performance, as Dovecot caches
the userdb in this case, whereas before we were getting NIS timeouts.

See http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2005-September/009331.html for
the history!

Hope this helps,
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