On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi wrote:
I've noticed that a lot of people are using e.g.:
mail_location = maildir:/var/vmail/%d/%n
Then either they don't have home directory set, or their home directory is the same as the maildir. http://wiki.dovecot.org/VirtualUsers/Home explains all the problems of not separate home and mail directories.
Also whenever I try to suggest using a separate home and mail directory, the answer is way too often: "But I'm using virtual users. (They don't have home directories.)"
So I started wondering. Maybe simply renaming the "home" to something else would help here at least some. Make all of the documentation use only the new word, and add alias for userdb so that the new name and the "home" both work (I guess docs would need to keep using the "home" as field name for some more years).
So far I've only come up with "vhome" as the replacement name. Other ideas?
Id like to share my experience that I just went through Sunday.
Four years ago I took over as sysadmin, and one of the things I did was clean up our mail system. One of the decisions I made was to get rid of what at the time seemed like an unnecessary extra folder called ".maildir" in every user's directory, which was only mail. So I moved all data to just /mail/domain/initial/username and that seemed to be great.
Now however, I am wishing I never did that. I seem to be having issues giving /mail/domain/initial/username as the home and maildir:~/ as the maildir (per user userdb mysql etc).
So I started a new quick project to move back to having a maildir folder in the user directory, also so I could then migrate to mdbox by having an mdbox folder there. Well on Sunday I had a mixup and i set all my user's home's to maildir:~/ which had a side effect of *moving* my entire domain folder to a different location, all 468 gigs of it and I thought it had all been deleted, total panic attack and a good two hours of going WTF and wanting to cry since my backup had also started running at the same time so I was missing all kinds of stuff on my live backup server, and to top it off, my third incremental backup server had a bad drive so that was totally flaky.
Anyway, I learned two lessons here. 1) Dont procrastinate fixing your backup server even if you have a third and think its not a big deal at the time and 2) I wish I would have kept the "maildir" folder in the user's "home" directory, even if they are virtual users.
On a side note, I happened to find my domain's mail directory and successfully merged it back with only minor noise from customers noticing. Good thing it was a sunday and the fair was in town.
/rookiemove FTL