August 2004 - dovecot

[Dovecot] starting/stopping Dovecot
by Tom Metro 31 Aug '04

31 Aug '04

http://www.dovecot.org/doc/INSTALL > Once everything is configured, there's two ways to start Dovecot: > > 1) Run "dovecot" binary which does everything. > > 2) Start it via inetd or similiar by executing "imap-login" or "pop3-login" > binaries. If you're listening in SSL port, add --ssl parameter. What are the pros and cons of using 'dovecot' vs. inetd. This may seem silly, but I noticed that there isn't any documentation saying what is the proper way to kill Dovecot. I assume it is to kill the 'dovecot' process. This is indirectly addressed in the Wiki: 6. Why can't I change the log location? http://wiki.dovecot.org/moin.cgi/QuestionsAndAnswers#head-c9650f53dd4f7ca2b… though the first few examples refer to <pid> without identifying the pid of what. Maybe adding a "How do I start Dovecot?" and "How do I stop Dovecot?" as the first two items on that page would be a good idea, and then the log file question and "7.1 Dovecot isn't running." and "8. Why doesn't Dovecot listen on localhost (127.0.0.1)?" could refer to those. (If this sounds reasonable, I'll update the Wiki.) Any plans to support a /var/run/dovecot/pid file or similar? What are your thoughts on including an init.d script in the distribution. I know some of the binary distributions will have platform-specific scripts included, but it might be good to include a generic one for those who build from source. -Tom

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[Dovecot] 0.99.11 release candidate
by Timo Sirainen 31 Aug '04

31 Aug '04

http://dovecot.org/rc/ So, we're back into 3 digit version numbers, 0.99.10.10 would have looked too ugly. Originally I was planning on making 0.99.10.x series only for a few months and leave 0.99.11 for the larger changes, but 1.0- tests are now used for that. Version numbering is difficult. So, assuming there are no problems found from this RC, I'll release 0.99.11 tomorrow. Changes are: + 127.* and ::1 IP addresses are treated as secured with disable_plaintext_auth = yes + auth_debug setting for extra authentication debugging + Some documentation and error message updates - If APPENDed mail ended with CR character, Dovecot aborted the saving - Output streams sometimes sent data duplicated and lost part of it. This could have caused various strange problems, but looks like in practise it rarely caused real problems.

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[Dovecot] User Auth problems
by Nikolaus Gerstmayr 31 Aug '04

31 Aug '04

Hi ! Problem: Auth doesn't work, can't figure out why :( More precisely: setup: dovecot 0.99.10.9 pop3 only Userdb + Passwd via passwd-file. Anything plaintext. (communication client server, passwords in passwd-file, well, for first tests non public server... if I get it working, I'll try better ways - of course) non standard parts of my config: protocols = pop3 ssl_disable = yes auth = default auth_mechanisms = plain auth_userdb = passwd-file /passwd_file auth_passdb = passwd-file /passwd_file auth_verbose = yes /passwd_file content: nick#sales.blabla:{PLAIN}test:500:500::::/mail/nick well, syntax is not 100% obvious from docu, but that's the way I understood it. (examples would be nice) That's how I understood semantics: If client sends user nick#sales.blabla and password test, dovecot accesses /mail/nick (maildir) with UID 500, GID 500 ???? problem: Auth fails. In logfiles I get this: dovecot-auth: Aug 30 22:36:20 Info: mech-plain(nick#sales.blabla): invalid username. (So no typo in mail client account setup or anytihng like this). Of course clients says auth fialed as well. Well, nick#sales.blabla is not a user on the test machine, but that's on purpose. It IS in /passwd-file :/ Anyone any idea ? Thx i.A for help !

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[Dovecot] [PATCH] [RFC] epoll based ioloop handler (now with patch)
by Andrey Panin 30 Aug '04

30 Aug '04

Sorry, I forgot to attach patch to previous mail. -- Andrey Panin | Linux and UNIX system administrator pazke(a)donpac.ru | PGP key: wwwkeys.pgp.net

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[Dovecot] [PATCH] NTLM fixes
by Andrey Panin 30 Aug '04

30 Aug '04

Hello, attached patch contains small NTLM fixes: - open code ntlmssp_des_encrypt_triad() function; - add two missing safe_memset(). It's not safe to leave NTLM hashes on the stack, because they are plain password equivalents. Please consider applying. Best regards. -- Andrey Panin | Linux and UNIX system administrator pazke(a)donpac.ru | PGP key: wwwkeys.pgp.net

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[Dovecot] Problems with registering new emails - imap/jfs/maildir
by Trond Eivind Glomsrød 29 Aug '04

29 Aug '04

After changing a mailserver from using mbox/ext3 (RHL9) to Maildir/jfs (RHEL 3), dovecot 0.99.10 no longer reports new email even if asked... I have to restart the mail client and do a fresh login to notice new email. This happens with multiple mail clients on multiple platforms, and didn't happen before the conversion... any suggestions on workarounds? -- Trond Eivind Glomsrød Senior Software Engineer Scali - www.scali.com High Performance Clustering

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[Dovecot] permission denied?
by Alex 29 Aug '04

29 Aug '04

I configured dovecot with Postfix with mysql Now I have directory /home/mail/virtual User/group postfix.postfix I added one domain, and one user. I login is successful but it gets interupted because of this. pop3(xx(a)private-projects.net): Aug 11 00:48:53 Error: lstat(/home/mail/virtual/private-projects.net/xx@private-projects.net/cur) failed: Permission denied pop3(xx(a)private-projects.net): Aug 11 00:48:53 Error: lstat(/home/mail/virtual/private-projects.net/xx@private-projects.net/cur) failed: Permission denied pop3(xx(a)private-projects.net): Aug 11 00:48:53 Warning: I/O leak: 0x8050cc0 (0) pop3(xx(a)private-projects.net): Aug 11 00:48:53 Warning: I/O leak: 0x8084e90 (1) [root@octalys dovecot]# ls -la /home/mail/virtual/private-projects.net/xx\(a)private-projects.net/cur/ total 8 drwxrw---- 2 postfix postfix 4096 Aug 2 21:47 . drwxrw---- 5 postfix postfix 4096 Aug 2 21:47 .. [root@octalys dovecot]# I added dovecot user to postfix group. I even tried chmod -R 777 * in virtual. It doesn't work. Whats the problem ?

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[Dovecot] MySQL passdb, auth_verbose, and documentation
by tmetro+dovecot＠vl.com 28 Aug '04

28 Aug '04

I've been playing around with Dovecot for the past few months for testing (on a Debian 3.0 system), and initially it was easy to setup and worked well. Recently I upgraded to 0.99.10.9, and when I rebuilt it I enabled MySQL and SSL. The first problem I ran into was upon startup it complained that there was no certificate, which makes sense, except that I hadn't enabled imaps in the config file. It would make more sense not to require SSL support files if SSL isn't being used. But this is minor. I encountered more serious problems when I tried migrating from real user accounts to virtual accounts via MySQL. Has anyone written a howto on setting up Dovecot with MySQL? (Just pointing to dovecot-mysql.conf leaves out a lot.) If not, I'll volunteer to write something up. I set up dovecot-mysql.conf as I thought it should be, created a database, added a record with a digest-md5 password, and changed some dovecot.conf directives as follows: default_mail_env = maildir:/var/mail/%d/%n/ auth_mechanisms = digest-md5 auth_default_realm = example.com auth_userdb = static uid=5000 gid=5000 home=/var/mail/%d/%n/ auth_passdb = mysql /etc/dovecot-mysql.conf For the static auth_userdb I wasn't quite sure what to put after home= as I wasn't really defining a home directory location. I initially tried making it identical to default_mail_env, but later learned that it clearly didn't like the "maildir:" prefix. Some questions the documentation left unanswered: Is home= required if default_mail_env will suffice for virtual users? Can mail= be used instead, as implied by the database documentation? Practically speaking, is there any difference between the two in the case of virtual user accounts? I tried to access Dovecot from a mail client and repeatedly received a login failure. Unfortunately, this is typical of what I saw in the log file: Aug 8 03:53:50 lex dovecot: Dovecot starting up Aug 8 03:53:52 lex dovecot-auth: MySQL: connected to localhost Aug 8 03:55:13 lex imap-login: Disconnected: Inactivity [192.168.0.200] I enabled auth_verbose: auth_verbose = yes and checked my syslog.conf to make sure all priorities were being logged: mail.* /var/log/syslog/mail.log but still no additional verbosity. How should things look different when auth_verbose is enabled? Checking MySQL's log I could see that Dovecot was successfully connecting to the database server, but never executing any queries. I was going to next turn on logging of all IMAP traffic, but noticed the Wiki suggested trying a manual session, which I did: % telnet localhost imap * OK dovecot ready. 1 LOGIN tmetro(a)example.com password 1 NO Login failed: Unsupported authentication mechanism Isn't this the kind of thing that should appear in the log when auth_verbose is enabled? That seemed odd, as 'digest-md5' is mentioned right in dovecot.conf as a valid choice. In retrospect, I gather what the message above is trying to tell me is that Dovecot wasn't configured to accept a 'plain' authentication, which is apparently what I was using in my manual session. It would be nice if the error message could express that a bit better. I did have some suspicion that it might be the that plain text authentication was being prevented, as at that point I didn't know what auth_mechanisms applied to, but I looked at dovecot.conf and found disable_plaintext_auth = no, which seemed to imply that plain text at the IMAP protocol level should have been permitted. Might it be clearer if that attribute was incorporated into the auth_mechanisms settings or at least moved into the auth section? I switched it to 'plain-md5', as mentioned in auth.txt, and tried again. That resulted in: Aug 8 21:11:53 lex dovecot-auth: Unknown authentication mechanism 'plain-md5' Aug 8 21:11:53 lex dovecot: Auth process died too early - shutting down Aug 8 21:11:53 lex dovecot: child 10293 (auth) returned error 89 Aug 8 21:11:53 lex imap-login: fd_send(-1) failed: Broken pipe That got me wondering whether there were two different areas where authentication terms apply - one being the password exchange in the IMAP protocol, and the other being how the password is stored on the server - yet the discussion of the two seems to be mixed together in the documentation. I tried switching to: auth_mechanisms = plain and finally got something more expected: Aug 8 21:20:44 lex dovecot-auth: mysql(tmetro(a)example.com): Password mismatch I tried putting the password into the database unencrypted, but that didn't work (probably because of my default_pass_scheme setting?). Generating a PLAIN-MD5 per auth.txt finally worked. This leads to some questions: auth_mechanisms doesn't seem to be describing the way in which the password is stored, so what does it describe? In dovecot-mysql.conf I had: default_pass_scheme = DIGEST-MD5 and didn't change it. What purpose does it serve? Is it only to identify the encryption used when there isn't a {SCHEME} tag present? For DIGEST-MD5, which encrypts "user:realm:pass", does realm include the @? Does user include @realm? I assumed no in both cases, yet it didn't work. In other matters...during one of my login attempts I got: * OK dovecot ready. 1 LOGIN tmetro(a)example.com password 1 OK Logged in. Connection closed by foreign host. The abrupt disconnect after an apparently successful login seemed odd. The log file showed: Aug 8 21:23:47 lex dovecot: chdir(maildir:/var/mail/example.com/tmetro/) failed with uid 5000: Permission denied Aug 8 21:23:47 lex dovecot: child 10315 (imap) returned error 89 which is the problem I discussed above, but is it reasonable for Dovecot to disconnect the IMAP socket and not send an error message to the client? At the end of the dovecot-example.conf is: #auth = digest_md5 #auth_methods = digest-md5 #auth_realms = #auth_userdb = passwd-file /etc/passwd.imap #auth_passdb = passwd-file /etc/passwd.imap #auth_user = imapauth #auth_chroot = Is auth_methods an alias for auth_mechanisms? Aside from the insufficient detail in the log, most of the difficulty I encountered could be avoided with better documentation and comments in the config files. I'd be happy to submit clarified comments once I get some answers to the above questions and confirm my understanding of how things work. -Tom

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[Dovecot] Authentication and Startup/Shutdown error.
by Andrew Lietzow 28 Aug '04

28 Aug '04

Hello and ... help! I am using Redhat FC2. I was looking for a simple POP3 compatible application package that would allow growth into secure mailboxes, and it looks like dovecot can fill the bill, and then some. I am a newbie. I scanned the Wiki but am as confused by it as I am by my problems. Fortunately for me, I don't need 7 different authentication schemes; I just need something simple that works with Thunderbird and Outlook Express. Is there a HOW-TO around that shows simple pop3 setup on Linux? #1) I had the pop3-login working for a bit, but now it has stopping starting up. When I attempt a <./dovecot stop>, I get a message that the stop has [FAILED]. I believe this is because it is leaving a lock in the /var/lock/subsys directory. I delete that file and try again, same problem. The system starts okay, but there are no longer any pop3-login processes being started up. <ps -elf | egrep pop3*> returns nothing but the grep process. #2) I need a simple method to access email. Nothing fancy as I only have a couple of users. Terrorists woud be wasting their time to monkey with my server. In the dovecot.conf file, here are a few of my settings. pop3_executable = /usr/libexec/dovecot/pop3 pop3_process_size = 256 auth = passwd auth_mechanisms = plain auth_realms = auth_default_realm = auth_userdb = passwd: /etc/passwd auth_passdb = passwd: /etc/passwd auth_executable = /usr/libexec/dovecot/dovecot-auth auth_process_size = 256 auth_user = root auth_count = 2 Any help would be greatly appreciated, of course. I'll keep scanning the web site while I am at your mercy. TIA, Andrew L. in Iowa _____________________________________________________________________ Get your own family web site at www.MyFamily.com!

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[Dovecot] 1.0-test37
by Timo Sirainen 28 Aug '04

28 Aug '04

http://dovecot.org/test/ - Added mbox_dirty_syncs setting, defaulting to yes. This means that while mbox is opened and new mails come, it only reads the new mails instead of the whole mbox. Then there's several checks that make sure this is safe to do and if something doesn't look right it fallbacks to syncing the whole mbox again. - dovecot-auth was leaking memory (not same bug as with 0.99/ldap) - Some other fixes

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