[Dovecot] Improvements to "Authentication failed" error

[Timo Sirainen]

On Oct 6, 2008, at 3:47 AM, Seth Mattinen wrote:

> Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> Probably one of the most commonly asked question is "Why does Dovecot
>> just say authentication failed"? It would be nice to be able to get  
>> rid
>> of these questions by having Dovecot itself point out the
>> http://wiki.dovecot.org/WhyDoesItNotWork link. But how to do this?  
>> There
>> are two groups of people here:
..
>
> There's no point in trying to program in fancy conditions for errors
> like this. It's just silly. Even if you make these changes I'll bet  
> you
> it doesn't make a difference. The same group you're trying to help  
> will
> see the long, wordy error message, glaze over it, and go straight to  
> "my
> password doesn't work and I know it's right".

It doesn't help for everyone, but I think it could reduce the number  
of these questions. I think I'm going to do this:

If /var/lib/dovecot/auth-success file doesn't exist at startup and  
protocols != none, print at startup:

If you have trouble with authentication failures, enable
auth_debug setting. http://wiki.dovecot.org/WhyDoesItNotWork

If the process printed that and a successful login comes in (master  
process sees it easily internally), create the auth-success file.

This should be only about 10-20 extra lines of code, doesn't change  
behavior for end users and shouldn't annoy sysadmins since it stops  
after the first successful authentication.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20081007/c301c5b6/attachment.bin