Hi All,

I installed dovecot on one of my servers the other day, and I want to use it in a vhosting environment. To this end, I have set it up to use password file authentication with a passwd file specified by me. This file will contain both system users and virtual accounts.

To test it, I set up two accounts in the dovecot passwd file. One is a system user, I give his home dir in the correct field, along with the MD5 hash of his password in its field, and everything seems to work OK (he can login, read mail out of /var/spool/mail/user etc.).

The seconmd account is a vhosted account, and I set the uid and gid to that under which the vhosting account exists. I did not set a home dir, but I set a mail dir in /var/spool/vmail/imap/vhost/user, and made this dir group writeable by dovecot. The user can login, but immediately upon authentication, dovecot segfaults (the log reports an "Internal login failure" and the authentication process is killed with signal 11, i.e. a segfault).

Has anyone encountered this before? Is this even the right way to set up vhosting (I don't want to go with LDAP or SQL authentication right at the moment, but I may move to that later on)? Are there any things I should look for (this is probably due to something I've done wrong) or make dovecot be a bit more verbose in reporting errors to its log?

Thanks in advance for any help. From what I've seen so far, dovecot looks like an excellent product.

Best, Tim Miller