[Dovecot] Temporary Failure that's Permanent!

[Bernd Petrovitsch]

On Mit, 2011-10-26 at 21:51 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> On 10/26/2011 8:48 AM, Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
> > On Mit, 2011-10-26 at 02:33 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> >> On 10/25/2011 2:34 PM, Charles Marcus wrote:
> > [....]
> >>> A word of advice... you need to take a breath, and START OVER.
[....]
> > Dovecot works fine on my CentOS-5.* and -6.
> 
> Yes, because you know what you're doing.

Every root/sysadmin/administrator is supposed to know what s/he is doing
- even if one runs Ubuntu;-)

[....]
> >> And don't roll-your-own-Dovecot from source.

BTW compiling dovecot is the usual `configure; make; make install' IIRC.

For the configuration: if it doesn't work out of the box, you have to
dive into it - even with .rpm/.deb based installs.
And if it works out of the box, it may have a too "open" default
configuration. SCNR ....

[....]
> > And I used it self-compiled (because there were at times no current
> > packages) and nowadays an RPM from some repo. 
> > Granted with sendmail as MTA but that shouldn't make a big difference.
[...]
> The OP is having trouble with a roll-your-own combo Dovecot and Postfix
> install.  He went this route because the CentOS 5.x packages are old as
> dirt.  Now he's having severe problems getting the RYO stuff working

Yes, because CentOS-5.* is old as dirt as it is basically an extremely
stable enterprise distribution.

> properly.
[...]
> If he has the option of using a distro with far more current packages,
> it would be much easier for him to get up and running.  Thus my

Does he has that option?
Running an old-and-stable distribution may have other reasons than "too
lazy to upgrade".

> suggestion to give Debian a try.  Any distro he's comfortable with and
> has access to, that has relatively up to date Dovecot and Postfix
> versions, would be just as suitable.

Debian/stable is (or at least was) usually similar old as
SuSE-enterprise and RHEL/CentOS. 

> The bulk of his problems stem from issues revolving around installing

If you know that exactly where his problems are, perhaps you should help
him to solve it and just tell him to start somewhere else from scratch.

> from source.  Moving to recent distro packages will very likely solve
> most of his problems.

The most simple usual RHEL/CentOS (and Debian/Stale BTW while we're at
it) solution is to try rebuilt the src.rpm (or src.deb, respectively)
from the current (or a newer) Fedora.
That might or not work without problems (like dependencies on quite
newer version of some libraries) but the try is a matter on an hour or
so.

Kind regards,
	Bernd
-- 
Bernd Petrovitsch                  Email : bernd at petrovitsch.priv.at
                     LUGA : http://www.luga.at