[Dovecot] Services not starting in 2.1 (or 2.2)

[Tom Talpey]

On 7/10/2013 9:22 AM, Tommy Wareing wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 08:42:20AM -0400, Tom Talpey wrote:
>> On 7/10/2013 8:09 AM, Tommy Wareing wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 06:33:55AM -0400, Charles Marcus wrote:
>>>> On 2013-07-10 5:28 AM, Tommy Wareing <tommyw at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>>>> I'm trying to install Dovecot onto my QNAP NAS.
>>>>
>>
>> Did you create the "dovenull" user, which is needed by 2.1+? I ran
>> dovecot 2.1.7 on my stock SS-439 quite successfully, until I completely
>> gave up on the QNAP firmware and reinstalled it with Ubuntu.
>
> Yes, I've got dovecot and dovenull users. In fact (just to check),
> doveconf for 2.0.21 complains if dovenull's not there:
> doveconf: Error: default_login_user doesn't exist: dovenull
> doveconf: Fatal: Error in configuration file /opt/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf: default_login_user doesn't exist: dovenull
>
> Interestingly, it doesn't complain about the absence of dovecot.

I guess I'd suggest configuring both log_path and info_log_path to
point somewhere, and look for additional clues in the output. Maybe
a missing home directory or a permissions problem on one of the
sockets in /var/run/dovecot, something like that. Remember the
QNAP firmware puts a bunch of that stuff in a very small ramdisk.

Tom.