April 2005 - dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] dovecot 0.99.xx to 1.0-stable how-to?
by Rich West 28 Apr '05

28 Apr '05

I realize that there have been some big changes in features and configuration file settings between 0.99.xx and 1.0-stable, so when I went to perform an upgrade on our testing server, I carefully combed through the configuration files and matched up everything I could. I fired up dovecot-1.0-stable and was pleased to see that it was happily running. I attempted to connect to it, and discovered that it wasn't listening to any ports.. then I realized that the app had crashed due to a typo in the config file (oops). Fixed that, started it up, and it was happily running and listening. However, it wouldn't authenticate any users.. Backing down to the 0.99.14 version that we had installed allowed for authentication (against ldap) to work just fine.. Is there anything that I should be looking for within the dovecot-1.0-stable that is dramatically different in regards to user authentication? -Rich

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[Dovecot] Root uid
by Chris L. Franklin 28 Apr '05

28 Apr '05

Whats the easy'est way to mod the source to allow the statis uid and or gid or of the users be root ? PS. I do wish this was an admin set-able option in the dovecot.conf -- Chris L. Franklin --

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Re: [Dovecot] Root uid
by Curtis Maloney 28 Apr '05

28 Apr '05

Chris L. Franklin wrote: >> Honestly, why do you want it to be root? It's NOT a good idea, even >> though Dovecot has so far shown to be very secure. > > > I disagree, strongly To which statement? That using root is not a good idea, or that Dovecot has shown to be secure? >> I thought the only thing stopping this (apart from good sense) is the >> minimum UID setting in the config file? > > Nope it's in the source to disallow it Oh, ok. Well, I'm not surprised. It's generally considered a bad practice. > PS. On the good sense part, It's way I use SELinux. I could just hand > out root's login on my box and not worry. > From what I understand, SELinux is a special case. What I've been told of it, it's an interesting idea, with much merit. I don't know enough to say either way. Maybe I'll take a closer look after I've finished delving into Sun's RBAC. As for the code changes, from memory the UID checking stuff is all in the one place ( in 0.99.14 it seems to be src/lib/restrict-access.c ). I'm not sure about 1.0... we'll move to that when we can have custom flags :) -- Curtis

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[Dovecot] Assertion Failures in Current CVS version
by Todd Burroughs 28 Apr '05

28 Apr '05

I've attached a few assertion errors in imap. Any fixes or advice on where to look are appreciated. This is with the CVS version, current as of April 27. Todd Burroughs

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[Dovecot] cutting everything after @
by Juraj Bednar 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

Hello, I am migrating one server to dovecot. The only problem is, that users have logins with @domain as part of their user name. I want to use pam auth (for other reasons, if only for dovecot, I would use mysql, but I need the same password db to be used for other services, like samba). Is there a way to allow this type of login? Just cut everything beginning with @. I can change the source code, but then I don't get nice automatic upgrades. Or can this be done easily with PAM? Thanks, Juraj.

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[Dovecot] Shared mailboxes and accessing MailDir not through IMAP
by Steffen Kaiser 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

Hello, I'm testing Dovecot that is part of Debian/sarge (v0.99.14-1). So far so good. I have migrated some mailboxes for testing with success and seems that everything works fine. One thing I do not figure out is, what to do about shared mailboxes, which are the very reason of searching for an alternative IMAP server, The Wiki states that there is some sort of shared mailboxes, based upon symlinks. Well, but since which version actually?? The Changelog stops at 2003-11-08 21:12 ? What I need is a mailbox (maildir) for a contact address (not a real shared mailbox, but several users shall be able to read a mail and delete it after processing). For this, one needs write permission to the mails therein only, the MDA takes care of to make the mails readable for the group. It would be good to see, if somebody had answered a mail already, but that's not required. What I tried is this: I setup all Unix-permissions of the folders (. cur new tmp: u=rwx,g=srwx) and their parents (u=rwx,g=x). Then I placed a symlink into the maildir of all users. Each user caches the INDEXes into an individual /var/ directory, not in the maildirs themselves. (BTW: I wonder why I need to give the group write permission to the base directory '.'). The mailbox shows up and is read-write. Now I wonder, what impact I'm to expect here? Esp. "The only problem is that currently everyone's message flags would be shared as well." (quote from a message of a thread taken from the Wiki) Then there is http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2003-March/001113.html the third item will apply to my situation, I guess. MailDir is (sort of) expected to be read by mutt directly, for instance. Because the mailboxes are located within the users home directories, some of them do this. Do this item mean that Dovecot is NOT expecting that mails are deleted in any other way than through itself? Otherwise Dovecot would find a change in the mailbox and rebuilt the index file regardless whether the change had been originated by another IMAP client or by directly manipulating the maildir. Bye, -- Steffen Kaiser

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[Dovecot] local users + virtual domains
by Micha Silver 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

I'm redesigning our mail server which holds several hundred mailboxes - most are local system users and some are virtual domains that we host. I understand that the 1.0x stable release allows for multiple auth mechinisms, so that I could use both PAM for local users and a passwd-file for the virtuals. If I want to stick with 0.99x can I mix and match in a single passwd-file the username/passwd for both local and virtual users? In dovecot.conf I'd have something like: default_mail_env = maildir:%h/Maildir auth-userdb = /etc/dovecot/passwd-file auth-passdb = /etc/dovecot/passwd-file then in passwd-file I'd enter: # local users localuser1:<passwd>:501:501::::: localuser2:<passwd>:502:502::::: ... #virtual domains virt1(a)example1.com:<passwd>:5001:5001::/var/vmail/%d/%u:/bin/false::INBOX=/var/vmail/%d/%u/Maildir postmaster(a)example1.com:<passwd>:5001:5001::/var/vmail/%d/%u:/bin/false::INBOX=/var/vmail/%d/%u/Maildir virt1(a)example2.com:<passwd>:5001:5001::/var/vmail/%d/%u:/bin/false::INBOX=/var/vmail/%d/%u/Maildir postmaster(a)example2.com:<passwd>:5001:5001::/var/vmail/%d/%u:/bin/false::INBOX=/var/vmail/%d/%u/Maildir ... Would this combination work? Thanks, Micha

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[Dovecot] dovecot stopping - no messages
by Nigel Allen 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

Greetings Running Fedora Core 3 and dovecot-0.99.13-3.FC3 as a production mail server for around 30+ accounts. A couple of times a day dovecot just stops. Nothing in the mail log except for Apr 26 00:48:19 sydsrv05 imap-login: Can't connect to auth process at default: Connection refused It's got to the point that I have put a script into cron.hourly to restart the dovecot service every hour. Any suggestions where to start looking please? Rgds Nigel -- Nigel Allen, Snr Consultant, ProSmart Consulting Australia 48 Tiarri Avenue, Terrey Hills, NSW 2084, Australia Tel: +61 2 9450 2690 Fax: +61 2 9450 2691 Mob: +61 4 1494 5269 http://www.prosmart.com.au

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Re: [Dovecot] docecot and procmail?
by Todd Burroughs 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005, Dan Stromberg wrote: > Is dovecot still considered unreliable when combined with NFS? I've been using the test releases and lately the current CVS release over NFS. We're using procmail to deliver mail and dovecot as the imap server. Imap access is sometimes through UW-imap on the same mailboxes. We keep the index files on the NFS server and are using mbox format. I am only running this on one server at this point, so you could see other problems if it is run on multiple servers. Procmail is run on several servers. We're probably testing around 50 mailboxes, some quite large. I haven't seen any corruption of the mboxes and some of them get hit pretty hard. >From my experience, I wouldn't call it "unreliable". I have this setting in the config: mmap_disable = yes I haven't tried using mmap yet... The server is Linux, kernel 2.6.x and the NFS server is a NetApp. Make sure that NFS locking is working. Todd

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[Dovecot] Problem with users home...
by websafe 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

Hi :) I hope this short example shows what problem I have: # returns users homedir from /etc/passwd grep user1 /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f6 # result: /home/group-subdir/user1 And the logfile... #maillog imap-login: Login: user1 [192.168.0.253] imap(user1): mkdir(/home/user1/Maildir/.Trash) failed: No such file or directory Why Dovecot tries to create /home/user1/Maildir/.Trash and NOT /home/group-subdir/user1/Maildir/.Trash as in /etc/passwd ??? Is there any solution? I'm running 0.99.14 # cat /etc/dovecot.conf ssl_disable = yes disable_plaintext_auth = no login = imap verbose_proctitle = yes default_mail_env = maildir:/home/%u/Maildir auth = default auth_mechanisms = plain auth_userdb = passwd /etc/passwd auth_passdb = shadow /etc/shadow auth_user = root Thanks in advance, -- websafe

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