Marcus Don wrote:
Also, how do you turn off index files altogether?
Put "INDEX=MEMORY" on your default_mail_env, by this you make Dovecot to use non-persistent memory indexes, for example:
default_mail_env = maildir:/nfs/%d/%u/Maildir:INDEX=MEMORY
So, whenever a user is deleted, we have to delete the index files from every machine in the cluster. A better solution would be to make the uid one of the variables available in default_mail_env. By naming index files by uid rather than username, this wouldn't be an issue.
If you move to memory indexes you have no use for this but since you use SQL authentication backend you could have very flexible layout for your mail spool and indexes. Just return properly formatted "mail" field on user_query, this will overwrite your default_mail_env you have in dovecot.conf.
For example
user_query = SELECT uid, .., concat('maildir:/nfs/', domain, '/', uid, '/Maildir:INDEX=/var/index/', domain, '/' uid) AS mail, ..
would read mail from /nfs/%domain/%uid/Maildir and store indexes to /var/index/%domain/%uid
Cool but not very neat.
More clean way to do this would be to have templates for environment variables like home, mail and index and use field names from SQL as fill in variables, like:
userdb sql { set home = /nfs/%%spool%%/%d/%%uid%% set mail = maildir:/nfs/%%spool%%/%d/%%uid%%/mail set index = /var/%3RHu/%d/%%uid%% args = /opt/dovecot/etc/sql.conf }
and then get fields like "spool" and "uid" from SQL and let the Dovecot to fill them into template environments you defined.
I know that Timo has more than enough work at the moment so if anyone on the list have some spare time please feel free to take a look on this :)
- authentication caching
Also since the alpha 4 release, we have found that, once the authentication cache is full, all subsequent login attempts for users that haven't been cached return "password mismatch". I though this might be a conflict with nscd, but it happens whether nscd is running or not. So, for the time being, we have had to disable the authentication cache.
Authentication caching was more or less broken in all of alpha series, there are fixes for those in CVS.
I'd be very keen to hear from anyone who has any feedback on any of the points above.
Have you thought of clustered file system to go with your Dovecot hosts and CLARiiON device?
-- Tomi Hakala