Thanks in advance for your patience and assistance. Since a system administrator's work is most successful when nobody knows you've done anything....(ugly that...you get neither raises nor equipment funding as a result), I prefer to learn from other's experiences rather than fail in the same pits.
We are considering a switch from UW to Dovecot, since our users persist in using the INBOX as a file cabinet (maybe 25% use homedir folders) and we currently have, I think, .mbox INBOXes which are thus getting massively unmanageable and fragile.
Machine config: Running IBM AIX 5.2/5.3 on an F80 with 4GB memory (may be upgraded to 16GB), with IBM's sendmail binary at V8.11.6p2, hand compiled procmail at 3.22, 64-bit binary from C for AIX V6.0
Some questions I couldn't find answered in the docs:
Crispin of UW has a formats.txt file in which he lists and evaluates the various formats. He calls the INBOX format type we use .unix (one big honking flat file). Q1: Is this what is described in the Dovecot docs mail-storages.txt file as .mbox?
Authentication: The DC docs don't mention using NIS/yp for authentication, that I can find. Q2: Does DC support NIS/yp authentication? I guess I could periodically do a ypcat passwd to a file and point DC at it...
on IBM's AIX Unix... Q3: Is there anyone out there running DC on AIX? 5.x or 4.3.3? JFS or JFS2?
Inbox location/format: = I will want to move from our legacy .mbox format to, I suppose, the DC default of Maildir++. = I will want to do this in groups over time, rather than all at once, so both formats will have to work = The legacy location of INBOXes has been /var/spool/mail/<userid>. The docs appear to say that Maildir format INBOXes should be in ~/Maildir. Q4:Can the INBOXes be in two location, the converted new Maildirs in ~, and the old unconverted in vsm? Or will I have to override the DC cfg'ed INBOX location to be VSM until I get them all converted and then move them all to ~/Maildir and change the DC config to that?
Some mention was made of procmail configuration issues Q5: Can procmail support both formats/locations, or will I have to put changes in the migrated users' procmailrc (what fun!)?
Again, thanks!
==== Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 sdean@bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035