Typically when using virtual users all you do is store their emails.
Why not introduce "stores"; Something like virtual_store or vstore
might work nicely.
Thanks
Romer Ventura
On Aug 24, 2010, at 1:43 PM, William Blunn wrote:
On 24/08/2010 15:57, Timo Sirainen 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?Note what follows is more a collection of ideas which jumps around
a bit rather than a cogent coherent logical sequence.Is there a potential problem with the term "virtual home" in as
much as for system users it is not virtual but the user's (actual)
home directory?That being the case I'd avoid the word "virtual". It seems we also
want to avoid the word "home".So I see logic in calling it the "user state directory" which could
be "userdir" for short.-=-
Is there a global configuration directive like "mail_location"
wherein the two directives could be placed adjacently?# Note: Fictional example. Does not work. mail_location = maildir:/var/vmail/%d/%n/mail user_state_directory = /var/vmail/%d/%n
-=-
Could the documentation be re-structured to encourage the
configuration of the two parts of the storage
- Mail directory
- User state directory
?
Then to say words to the effect of:
"For virtual user environments, you need to set both of these
aspects up. You may want to set up mail as a subdirectory off the
user state directory. Alternatively you can put them in separate
locations.""For system user environments, you may want to have the user state
directory go directly on to the user's home directory / a
subdirectory of the user's home directory."-=-
Another idea would be to say that, perhaps for Dovecot 2.1 (i.e. a
suitably large version bump), that having a configuration which
Dovecot could divine leaves things open to filesystem name clashes
between the user state directory and the mail directory (or
whatever is considered to be a bad outcome of not properly
configuring the user state directory) would create a fatal error at
daemon start time. Perhaps there could be a configuration directive
to override this check, wrapped in suitably comprehensive
documentation which means that people who absolutely insist can ice
skate uphill, but the path of least resistance would be to
configure Dovecot properly.Bill