[Dovecot] Understanding Sockets

[Tim Smith]

Thanks Ben,

I'm using an Ubuntu Server OS (10.04) and it seems that the latest 
package they provide is 1.2.9.

Do you know if anyone has had any success getting a Dovecot 2 package on 
this Ubuntu distro and how they went about it (Not comfortable compiling 
sources at this point!!)?

Tim

On 21/12/12 00:21, Ben Morrow wrote:
> At 10PM +0000 on 20/12/12 Tim Smith wrote:
>> Just trying to consolidate my knowledge of Dovecot and I want to
>> understand various things rather than just key out lines of config in
>> dovecot.conf with the hope of it working.
>>
>> What I wanted to clarify is my understanding the "socket listen" section
>> of the config file. From my limited understanding, this section details
>> how other processes can access the userdb defined in Dovecot. The master
>> socket is used for "internal" processes which is mainly dovecot-lda so
>> that when Dovecot receives mail it knows where to deliver it and client
>> is defined for "external" processes, for example Postfix who would use
>> the info to determine if a user existed. Would you say this is a fair
>> (albeit) dumbed down!!) synopsis of sockets and their purpose?
> Your mention of 'socket listen' and 'master' auth sockets suggests you
> are using Dovecot 1.x. That description is pretty-much correct for 1.x,
> however you should upgrade to 2.x as soon as you reasonably can, since
> 1.x is no longer supported. See http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Services#auth
> for a description of the socket types available with Dovecot 2.
>
> [The statement there that 'client' sockets can safely be exposed to the
> entire world, including over inet sockets, is not entirely true. AFAIK
> there is no rate limiting, so an exposed 'client' socket is a password
> oracle and should therefore be somewhat protected. The risk is
> approximately equivalent to an unshadowed password file, with the
> encrypted passwords exposed.]
>
> Ben
>