Managing users and home dirs

[deano-dovecot at areyes.com]

Just a quick update on the below ... The 3-node setup is working
cleanly now. One master/backup DB node, two dovecot nodes, using Percona
Xtradb Cluster 5.5. All replication (percona and dovecot dsync) is via
ipsec tunnels. 

Adding a user or new domain is a matter of creating a
/var/mail/newusers.txt file, containing the list of users to be added.


john,doe.com,password,John Doe user 

A cronjob on both dovecot nodes
scans the user database and the /var/mail dirs. For any new users in the
file it adds them to the DB and creates their userdir/Maildir. Any new
user in the DB without a userdir, it creates their userdir/Maildir. So
it's a max of 5 minutes for a new user to be available on node1, and
another 5 minutes to be replicated to node2. Once the users are created,
the newusers.txt file is deleted. 

It would be nice to use a database
trigger to create the userdir/Maildir immediately rather than the
cronjob, but I haven't got that figured out yet. I found the
lib_mysqludf_sys UDF library, but it doesn't seem to be working. Some
issue with the db replication I think. 

Any ideas for creating a
directory from a mysql trigger ? 

On 2014-06-21 11:12,
deano-dovecot at areyes.com wrote: 

> For those of you using virtual
users, and SQL, how are you managing
> your users and their home dirs ?
That is, what process do you use for
> adding/deleting users, creating
their home dirs etc ? I suppose it's
> easy enough to do manually,
inserting rows in the database, creating
> dirs, chown/chmod yada yada,
but there must be a better way to do it ...
> If you're doing dovecot
replication then it gets even more cumbersome,
> having to duplicate the
effort in two places (and make sure it's
> correct). 
> 
> I have a nice
test setup using Percona XtraDB Clustering in
> a 3-node cluster which
works swimmingly, albeit in VMs only at the
> moment. A master DB node
and two dovecot nodes. Dovecot replication is
> up and running nicely
too, and I almost have all the communications
> going over ipsec
tunnels, so it will be nice and secure. 
> 
> D.