Timo Sirainen put forth on 3/27/2010 2:18 AM:

On Sat, 2010-03-27 at 02:10 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

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Maybe the native english speakers (and I'd think only a subset of them too). I had never heard of dovetail.

I'm guessing that's because you're not a woodworker, or know any. ;) It's a great hobby if you ever found the spare time.

Sure. But we're talking about UNIX admin kind people here. Somehow I doubt they spent much attention to woodworking classes at school (we actually had such classes, and I might know the Finnish word for dovetail if someone told me it, but I doubt it's common knowledge in either language).

Probably depends on what city/state/province/country as well. I'm in the midwest USA, and alot of people in general, sysadmins or not, are DIY type folks. You grow up on a farm or in a small town and learn a whole lot of non computer stuff (including basic woodworking) before going to college and then to the big city for the sysadmin job. Then you visit mom/dad on the weekends, and they have you rebuilt the kitchen and bathroom. Then you decide to rebuild your own kitchen and bathroom. And then your neighbors find out you know how to do that kind of work and ... you lose a few more weekends. :(

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I want something that's at least potentially understandable to people who understand english (and not just native speakers). I wouldn't know why some process is owned by user "dovel". That might not even make me realize it's a Dovecot process.

How about "pigeon"? Dovecots house two kinds of birds, doves, and, far more often, pigeons. So, pigeon should be the new user name. No one knows what the heck a "dovecot" is until they look it up anyway (at least non Scots), so using "pigeon" is in keeping with naming your server Dovecot. There. Now that that's settled...

But Dovecot is the name of the software, and admins know that, even if they have no clue what it means. dove* as the username makes them think of Dovecot regardless.

You think anyone is going to add the user "pigeon" to any groups? I'm thinking that, as with "dovenull", that most would avoid touching "pigeon" at all costs. Then again, some may think their system was hacked, and want to remove the user "pigeon" lol. If your main goal is getting people to leave that user alone, I think pigeon would definitely fit the bill. And it adds a bit of humor to the mix since pigeons tend to crap all over everything. ;)

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dovecot dove-main dovecot-auth dove-auth imap-login dove-imaplgn pop3-login dove-poplgn imap dove-imap pop3 dove-pop3

Just a thought. But a nice thought at that. :)

But you're talking about process names, right? That's already changed in v2.0. You have one "dovecot" process and everything else is "dovecot/*". For example:

root 1840 0.0 0.0 43140 1328 pts/0 S+ 05:02 0:00 /usr/local/sbin/dovecot -F dovecot 1841 0.0 0.0 30568 976 pts/0 S+ 05:02 0:00 dovecot/anvil root 1842 0.0 0.0 30676 1120 pts/0 S+ 05:02 0:00 dovecot/log root 2500 0.0 0.1 38524 2760 pts/0 S+ 08:59 0:00 dovecot/lmtp root 2501 0.0 0.2 37684 4372 pts/0 S+ 08:59 0:00 dovecot/config dovecot 2502 0.0 0.1 68500 3112 pts/0 S+ 08:59 0:00 dovecot/auth

Ahh, sw333t! I haven't played with 2.0 yet so I hadn't seen this yet. That's precisely the kinda thing I had in mind.

See? Great minds think alike. (most of the time anyway) ;)

-- Stan