Hello...

I wanted to use dovecot virtual users with sendmail. As you probably know, this doesn't work by default.  The more scalable solution is probably to use LDAP, but I really don't like it.  This is how I did it

Basically I abused glibc's db feature in /etc/nsswitch

in /var/db/Makefile something like this:

$(VAR_DB)/passwd.db: /etc/dovecot/usersfile
  @printf %s "$(patsubst %.db,%,$(@F))... "
  @$(AWK) 'BEGIN { FS=":"; OFS=":" } \
  /^[ \t]*$$/ { next } \
  /^[ \t]*#/ { next } \
  /^root/ { next } \
  /^[^#]/ { printf ".%s ", $$1; \
printf "%s:x:65534:65534:%s:/home/vmail/%s:/sbin/nologin\n", $$1, $$1, $$1; \
                            }' $^ | \
  $(MAKEDB) -o $@ -
@echo "done."

make -C /var/db

getent passwd ; shows

...

virtualuser:x:65534:65534:virtualuser:/home/vmail/virtualuser:/sbin/nologin
othervuser:x:65534:65534:othervuser:/home/vmail/othervuser:/sbin/nologin

A longer explanation and more info is in the github repository

It takes about 10 minutes to go from new clean server to working email server with this

I've been running this in production for about a week now without any problems.

Question:

Has anyone else done this? I don't see any downsides, but I might be missing something.

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