/var/run/dovecot permission issues

[Matt Simpson]

> On Aug 17, 2017, at 9:19 AM, Matt Simpson <dclist at list.jmatt.net> wrote:
> 
> I have an issue that surfaced when I tried to start using the new metrics service, but it looks like it may be a more generic issue.
> 

When I took a closer look at this, it might be a problem with the FreeBSD packaging of dovecot, and not in dovecot itself.

I’m running FreeBSD 11, and installed dovecot as a package using standard FreeBSD package utilities.   The install process creates a start/stop script, and that script is creating the /var/run/dovecot directory at startup and removing it at shutdown. 

The command which creates the directory is

/usr/bin/install -o root -g wheel -m 0755 -d ${base_dir}

which apparently just creates a directory with the specified owner and group.

At this point, I’m a little confused about the best way to proceed.  Any other FreeBSD dovecot users here?  Currently, it looks like the startup script is creating /var/run/dovecot, owned by root.  Then dovecot creates /var/run/dovecot/stats-mail, also owned by root.  I could possibly alter the startup script to create /var/run/dovecot owned by dovecot instead of root, but I don’t think that will change the ownership of stats-mail, which seems to be created by dovecot running as root, and then attempted to write by dovecot running as a different user.  Does anybody know what’s going on here?