Hi list,

# dovecot --version 2.2.13

We use Dovecot LDA and I've discovered lots of messages stating that lock files cannot be written:

Mar 16 12:02:03 mailhost dovecot: lda(someuser): Error: file_dotlock_open(/home/sg/someuser/.dovecot.lda-dupes) failed: No such file or directory

That user's home directory is fetched from LDAP and does not exist locally on our 'mailhost' machine, so those error messages do make sense; I would like to fix that situation.

In our current Dovecot configuration, only mail_location is set:

mail_location = maildir:/var/mail/%u

I would like to ignore the erroneous 'home' attribute fetched from LDAP and specify a common mail_home, i.e. set:

mail_home = /var/mail/%u/home

but if I understand correctly, that global mail_home configuration directive would still be overridden by the LDAP 'home' attribute fetched from passdb:

[...] pass_attrs = supannAliasLogin=user,userPassword=password,
homeDirectory=userdb_home,uidNumber=userdb_uid,gidNumber=userdb_gid [...]

Can I just remove homeDirectory from pass_attrs to skip fetching 'home' from LDAP and then set the global mail_home ?

Also, if that works:

We would switch from a situation where a home is set (but wrong) to one where it becomes valid. Can there be any side-effect in that case (apart from fixing locking problems) ?

Finally, will mail_home (leaf) directory be created if it does not exist yet (parent directory exists) ?

Best regards,

-- Ganael Laplanche ganael.laplanche@centralesupelec.fr Unix Systems Engineer @CentraleSupelec Rennes