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
On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 10:32:21AM -0400, Stewart Dean wrote:
- 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!)?
Well I think I can answer this bit. Current versions of procmail do support maildir as well as mbox but which format is written is specified in the .procmailrc file (or whatever you use for procmail's recipes). If the destination has a / on the end then procmail will write maildir, if there is no trailing / then it will write mbox.
-- Chris Green (chris@areti.co.uk)
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."Stewart Dean wrote:
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?
Yes. It's often called "Berkeley" format and shouldn't be confused with Marc Crispin's proprietary "mbx" format. The start of each message begins with a "From " line.
- 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...
Yes, it works fine with just "passdb = passwd" and "userdb = passwd", at least in Solaris (/etc/nss_switch.conf has "passwd: files nis" and "group: files nis"). Or you can use PAM.
Best Wishes, Chris
-- --+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+- Christopher Wakelin, c.d.wakelin@reading.ac.uk IT Services Centre, The University of Reading, Tel: +44 (0)118 378 8439 Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AF, UK Fax: +44 (0)118 975 3094
On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 10:32 -0400, Stewart Dean wrote:
Some questions I couldn't find answered in the docs:
1, 2 and 5 seem to be answered already, so I'll answer the rest two:
- on IBM's AIX Unix... Q3: Is there anyone out there running DC on AIX? 5.x or 4.3.3? JFS or JFS2?
There was just another mail about AIX having problems with timezones (Subject: Time zone problems with dovecot-1.0-stable (20050705 nightly snapshot)). Maybe look at how that thread continues if you have the same problem.
One thing I've seen with Linux+JFS is that directory's mtime wasn't modified when new files were added to it, which broke maildir's new mail checks. But maybe this was a bug in some specific Linux version. If anyone is running JFS, I'd like to know if this problem still exists..
- 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?
One possibility is to let Dovecot autodetect the mailbox location. It checks for ~/Maildir first and ~/mail second. It's probably the easiest way, but if some users have created ~/Maildir accidentally you'll get into trouble.
Another possibility is to specify separately for each user where their mails are stored. But if you're going to be using NIS as userdb, this isn't possible..
http://wiki.dovecot.org/moin.cgi/Migration and http://wiki.dovecot.org/moin.cgi/Namespaces will also help how to do the change transparently to users.
Stewart:
I am running (still non-production) dovecot 1.0 from the July 5 daily snapshot under AIX 5.1 using JFS, with maildir mailboxes in a custom location.
The timezone issue I posted to the list last week is the only problem I've noticed to date.
Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi wrote:
On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 10:32 -0400, Stewart Dean wrote:
Some questions I couldn't find answered in the docs:
1, 2 and 5 seem to be answered already, so I'll answer the rest two:
- on IBM's AIX Unix... Q3: Is there anyone out there running DC on AIX? 5.x or 4.3.3? JFS or JFS2?
There was just another mail about AIX having problems with timezones (Subject: Time zone problems with dovecot-1.0-stable (20050705 nightly snapshot)). Maybe look at how that thread continues if you have the same problem.
One thing I've seen with Linux+JFS is that directory's mtime wasn't modified when new files were added to it, which broke maildir's new mail checks. But maybe this was a bug in some specific Linux version. If anyone is running JFS, I'd like to know if this problem still exists..
- 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?
One possibility is to let Dovecot autodetect the mailbox location. It checks for ~/Maildir first and ~/mail second. It's probably the easiest way, but if some users have created ~/Maildir accidentally you'll get into trouble.
Another possibility is to specify separately for each user where their mails are stored. But if you're going to be using NIS as userdb, this isn't possible..
http://wiki.dovecot.org/moin.cgi/Migration and http://wiki.dovecot.org/moin.cgi/Namespaces will also help how to do the change transparently to users.
participants (5)
-
Chris Green
-
Chris Wakelin
-
Jon Roma
-
Stewart Dean
-
Timo Sirainen