I'm running dovecot-1.0.10 on a Solaris 10 server with home dirs automounted over NFS. I have set the mail_location configuration option so that nothing should be written to a user's home dir over NFS but, as far as I can tell, dovecot still by default tries to chdir to a user's home dir when reading mail, although this is not required. This creates additional unnecessary load on a heavily-loaded fileserver and generally slows everything down and creates an unnecessary dependency.
Is there a way to prevent dovecot from causing the home dirs to be mounted?
You can override the home dir returned by your userdb with a variable-expanded, "static" value by adding home to args[1]. You need to be careful and make sure that Dovecot doesn't use anything in the users' home dirs. You may need to set mail_location and/or mail and create a virtual home-dir tree local to the Dovecot server.
Thanks. Are you suggesting I add something like the following? userdb static { args = home=/some/random/dir } Incidentally, what I really wanted was for the user's home dir only to be mounted for imap connections (when it could be usefully used), not POP3. I thought by moving the indexes dir this would just happen.
Posting
dovecot -noutput would help.
# 1.0.10: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf protocols: imap imaps pop3s disable_plaintext_auth: no login_dir: /usr/local/var/run/dovecot/login login_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login mail_extra_groups: mail mail_location: mbox:/var/mail/.mboxes/%u:INBOX=/var/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/mail/.indexes/%u mail_debug: yes mmap_disable: yes mail_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap mail_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3 mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/pop3 pop3_reuse_xuidl(default): no pop3_reuse_xuidl(imap): no pop3_reuse_xuidl(pop3): yes pop3_uidl_format(default): pop3_uidl_format(imap): pop3_uidl_format(pop3): %08Xv%08Xu auth default: mechanisms: plain login passdb: driver: pam userdb: driver: passwd
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