On Mon, 2009-08-24 at 15:05 -0400, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Wed, 2009-08-19 at 13:18 +0100, Arthur Dent wrote:
dovecot: Dovecot v1.2.0 starting up (core dumps disabled): 1 Time(s) dovecot: IMAP(mark): fchown() failed with file /home/mark/Mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.log.newlock: Operation not permitted: 1 Time(s)v1.2.3+ would have given a bit better error message here.
Ironically, since I posted my original message last week Fedora issued an updated Dovecot package, so here is yesterday's message in syslog:
**Unmatched Entries** dovecot: Dovecot v1.2.3 starting up (core dumps disabled): 1 Time(s) dovecot: IMAP(helena): fchown(/home/wife/mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.cache.lock, -1, 12(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=501(helena), group based on /var/mail/helena): 1 Time(s) dovecot: IMAP(mark): chown(/home/mark/Mail/.imap/INBOX, -1, 12(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=500(mark), group based on /var/mail/mark): 1 Time(s) dovecot: IMAP(mark): fchown(/home/mark/Mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.cache.lock, -1, 12(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=500(mark), group based on /var/mail/mark): 1 Time(s) dovecot: IMAP(mark): fchown(/home/mark/Mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.log.newlock, -1, 12(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=500(mark), group based on /var/mail/mark): 1 Time(s) dovecot: IMAP(mark): fchown(/home/mark/Mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.tmp, -1, 12(mail)) failed: Operation not permitted (egid=500(mark), group based on /var/mail/mark): 1 Time(s) dovecot: IMAP(mark): mkdir(/home/mark/Mail/.imap/INBOX) failed: Operation not permitted: 1 Time(s)
Anyway the issue is that nowadays Dovecot tries to preserve mailbox's permissions so that shared mailboxes work properly. What permissions do you have in the actual INBOX file?
ls -la /var/mail/ total 202024 drwxrwxr-x. 2 root mail 4096 2009-08-26 10:30 . drwxr-xr-x. 15 root root 4096 2009-08-13 12:35 .. -rw-rw----. 1 clamav mail 0 2009-08-12 12:40 clamav -rw-rw----. 1 wife mail 190669010 2009-08-26 10:00 wife -rw-rw----. 1 mark mail 8421931 2009-08-26 09:46 mark -rw-------. 1 root root 787636 2009-08-26 10:30 root -rw-rw----. 1 rpc mail 0 2009-08-11 16:26 rpc -rw-rw----. 1 son mail 6750285 2009-08-26 00:39 son
My guess is that you have 0660 permissions of /var/mail/$USER so Dovecot tries to preserve the group. Easiest fix that also makes your system more secure is to chmod 0600 it.
Hmmm - OK, seems you're right about that. Will changing it break anything else? Why does group "mail" exist?
I will try chmod 0600 and see what happens.
As I access my mailbox several times a day (and certainly did yesterday) from several different mail clients I am surprised that the error count is only 1 for most the above entries. Is this being caused by some sort of cron job (logrotate perhaps)?
It happens only when index files are being created/rotated, which happens automatically "every once in a while".
Thanks very much. Your help is greatly appreciated...
Mark