- dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] dovecot-1.0-test8 / nfs / maildir / flags issues
by Maikel Verheijen 14 May '04

14 May '04

Hi List, While (bluntly) testing the prerelease version of dovecot on our mailfarm (just for the webmail imap) we noticed some small problems: - While our OLD dovecot/imap drove the load to a maximum of 1 over a day after running, the new dovecot/imap pushes it easily to 20. This is mainly due to a LOT more disk activity. This is probably caused by the fact we a) use indexes on disk and b) there are no indexes left. I hope this will smooth out when most of the indexes are made. - We notice some very strange "delete" flag things in our IMP webmail system (working on a test environment to be more specific). The problem is that if you mark some messages "deleted", a lot of messages that do NOT have "deleted" flag are also in the deleted list. Since nothing changed on the webmail, it must be in the way dovecot responds different in the new version on certain requests. - In the dotlocking code, it seems that dovecot uses time() for it's internal locktime, and uses stat() to see if the file-time of the lock is different. Since we use nfs there might be a time-difference on the file creation and time() when our nfs gets "busy". This happens a lot when the indexes are created for multiple users at the same time resulting in a lot of: May 12 08:57:44 mf1 dovecot[3763]: imap(user(a)domain.tld): Our dotlock file /var/mail/mounted/d/do/domain.tld/user/Maildir/.INBOX/ dovecot.index.log.lock was modified (1084345063 vs 1084345062), assuming it wasn't overridden I am not completely sure if this interrupts imap traffic. I think this MIGHT be solved by storing a stat() time as the locktime instead of a time(), but this might be intentional. - I patched dovecot to report its pid in syslog messages, in order to find the "killed by signal X" where X are mostly 11 and 6 processes. The pids reported do not show up in the rest of the log file, so these may be "disconnected" sessions? It seems that the "old" version has the same problem, and nobody really complained it was broken, so this isn't a big issue. To clarify our setup: We use multiple mail-frontends running dovecot that are load-balanced by a cisco load-balancer. We mount our mailstores from an active-active backend cluster, both nodes export a big partition, and take over the job of the other in case of a problem. This seems to go pretty smooth. Our users are stored in a pgsql database. In our current setup, we run a modified cvs version of dovecot from WAY back, to support nfs. The backdraw is that we can't use the newer dovecot releases, since I couldn't modify the source in the way I did it the first time (with a LOT of help from Timo :P). If anyone has some ideas on where to look and where to test in order to get our problems more clear, I would be very grateful :) Kind regards, Maikel Verheijen Ladot Nederland BV.

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[Dovecot] Problem building 1.0-test7 : missing header
by Curtis Maloney 13 May '04

13 May '04

Greetings, I recently rolled out Dovecot in our small (<30 people) company, and have been mightily impressed by the quality, performance and ease of use. I was hoping to use the new versions soon, as I'd like to start using CRAM-MD5 (much more common in mail clients than DIGEST-MD5), but found the 0.99.11 versions too unstable. So, I tried to build last nights CVS snapshot (May 10th), only to have the make break at this point: make[3]: Entering directory `/home/src/dovecot-1.0-test7/src/lib-index' make[3]: *** No rule to make target `mail-index-util.h', needed by `mail-cache.o'. Stop. I know it's not much, but it's a start at giving back a little. Hope it helps. -- Curtis Maloney

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[Dovecot] Codepage of folder names
by Petr Tuma 13 May '04

13 May '04

Hi, I have run into a problem configuring DoveCot 0.99 on a Linux server that handles Windows users. The server uses UTF8 on its filesystem but the Outlook IMAP folder names are sent in what looks like CP852. As a result, folder names that use national characters are damaged, which in turn breaks a webmail application running on the same server. A natural solution would be DoveCot translating folder names from CP852 coming across the wire to UTF8 used in filesystem operations, but I did not find any option for that in the configuration. Anybody encountered and solved this problem ? Petr Tuma

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[Dovecot] Is Dovecot ready for production use?
by Benjamin J. Weiss 12 May '04

12 May '04

Hi! I'm currently running RH 9 with postfix, uw-imap and MailScanner. I want to install Fedora Core 2 (when it comes out next week) with postfix, dovecot and amavisd. I'm unhappy with the problems I'm having with MailScanner, with the difficulty I've had with authentication as I am currently configured, and want to move to Maildir instead of mbox. That being said, is dovecot stable enough yet for production use? I only have four users on my home linux box, but I personally get around 500 emails a day (that fedora list is *busy*). Thanks, Ben

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[Dovecot] php.ini tweak
by Avery 12 May '04

12 May '04

I noticed this is my /etc/php.ini file ---------------------------------------- ; This directive tells PHP whether to declare the argv&argc variables (that ; would contain the GET information). If you don't use these variables, you ; should turn it off for increased performance. register_argc_argv = on ---------------------------------------- I ma trying to squeeze some extra performance out of my email server. If I turn this to off will this cause any problems with SQmail or any of SQmail's plugins. I tried turned this setting to off and everything seems to work fine. I am surprised that no one has asked about this before in this mailing list. Thanks, Avery

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[Dovecot] LDAP + passwd
by Paolo Basenghi 12 May '04

12 May '04

Hello, I'm in the process to choose between Courier and Dovecot. I would like to know if it's possible to configure Dovecot in order to use multiple user database (e.g. ldap+passwd) in order to have both virtual user authenticated by LDAP and system user authenticated by system password and with their own home directory. Another question: at http://dovecot.org/doc/dovecot-example.conf there is a configuration example that seems not work with Dovecot 0.99.10.4 It result in a "Fatal: Error in configuration file /etc/dovecot.conf line 391: Missing value". Line 391 is: "auth default {" Thank you for attention. Best regards. -- ___________________________________________________________________ Ing. PAOLO BASENGHI :::: Systems & Networking Engineer p.basenghi(a)netribe.it ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ NETRIBE srl :: Collaborative E-Business 42100 :: Reggio Emilia :: Italy :: Via della Costituzione, 27/4 ph. +39 0522 232378 :: fax +39 0522 232386 :: http://www.netribe.it ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

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[Dovecot] Case sensitive user names
by Jeff Graves 11 May '04

11 May '04

Hello list. This is my first post and I hope that I have something useful for people. Using Fedora Core 1 with the stock dovecot-0.99.10 RPM I noticed that user names were case sensitive which was a problem for me since I was attempting to set up winbind authentication which meant that what dovecot thought the homedir was could change depending upon the case the user typed in. Sendmail/procmail always changed the username to lowercase so I needed a way to duplicate this behavior. At any rate, I searched the archives and found Andrew's post from March: http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2004-March/003067.html - using this as a jumping point and I finally have case insensitive user names (better yet, forced lower case usernames) working for plain-text authentication (eg. dovecot.conf: auth = plain, auth_userdb = passwd, auth_passdb = passwd). It has been tested only on the source RPM from Redhat FC1 and I'm not a C programmer so I have no idea if it will work with other authentication methods or newer versions of software. I've rebuilt the RPMs (source and i386) if anyone's interested and here's the patch for those not using RPMs (it's attached as well): diff -ru dovecot-0.99.10/src/auth/mech-plain.c dovecot-0.99.10.new/src/auth/mech-plain.c --- dovecot-0.99.10/src/auth/mech-plain.c 2003-05-18 08:26:28.000000000 -0400 +++ dovecot-0.99.10.new/src/auth/mech-plain.c 2004-05-11 16:58:30.000000000 -0400 @@ -57,6 +57,7 @@ authenid); } + auth_request->user = str_lcase(auth_request->user); if (!mech_is_valid_username(auth_request->user)) { /* invalid username */ if (verbose) { Thanks, Jeff Graves, MCP Customer Support Engineer Image Source, Inc. 10 Mill Street Bellingham, MA 02019 508.966.5200 - Phone 508.966.5170 - Fax jeff(a)image-src.com - Email

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[Dovecot] nfs dotlock issues
by Maikel Verheijen 11 May '04

11 May '04

Hi List, While testing with dovecot-1.0-test8 on our platform, I get al lot of these: May 11 11:42:50 mf1 dovecot: imap(user(a)domain.tld): Our dotlock file /var/mail/mounted/d/do/domain.tld/user/Maildir/.INBOX/ dovecot.index.log.lock was modified (1084268570 vs 1084268875), assuming it wasn't overridden This is probably due to some time-issues on our platform, and the load the backend has. (our backends run in a live environment). Can the dotlock code get the timestamp of the file when the dotlock gets created in order to be able to keep the time in sync? Is there another way to prevent those seconds of time-difference? we run ntpd on both our frondends and our backends. Kind regards, Maikel Verheijen

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[Dovecot] 1.0-test7
by Timo Sirainen 10 May '04

10 May '04

http://dovecot.org/test/ Lots of bugfixes related to syncing. There's still some left. Somewhat working mbox support: - combined syncing/rewriting uses much less disk I/O than with older mbox code - expunges aren't working yet - last-uid field in X-IMAPbase header isn't updated - it's currently syncing the whole mbox constantly even if it hasn't changed - it isn't hiding the mbox-specific headers from IMAP clients - if mbox hasn't changed, rewriting could start from the message which requires rewriting instead of syncing the whole mbox - syncing could keep the lock file extra two seconds to make sure if someone changes it the file's mtime changes -> as long as only Dovecot is modifying it, we'll never need to sync the whole mbox -> multi-gigabyte mboxes are still fast! One nice thing about this mbox code is that it isn't exactly mbox-specific. Some people are still using formats which use eg. ^A as separator rather than From-line. Some people are using SMTP-formatted data directly ('.' as mail separator, '..' = normal line begins with '.'). These formats should be pretty easy to implement now as all mbox-specific code is in istream-raw-mbox.c file. I'll probably do that once mbox itself is fully working.

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[Dovecot] Mail always is delivered to /var/mail/
by Kevin Breit 07 May '04

07 May '04

Hey, I am setting up Dovecot on Debian with Postfix. I am telling Dovecot to use maildir:~/Maildir but it persists in dumping mail in mbox format in /var/mail/username. Can anyone suggest ideas? My config file is attached. Thanks Kevin

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