- dovecot - dovecot.org

[Dovecot] Questions about mail process chroots
by Brett Smith 22 Sep '04

22 Sep '04

Greetings, I am configuring a new Dovecot installation, and the way the valid_chroot_dirs and mail_chroot variables affect the mail processes are a bit unclear to me. I was wondering if anyone could provide me with more specific details than the comments in the configuration file do, or maybe even recommend some values given my configuration. We have a Debian GNU/Linux system and a mix of users with shell accounts and users with disabled logins. Both these groups should be handled the same way by Dovecot: auth_userdb is passwd and auth_passdb is pam. The dovecot PAM service will use pam_mysql.so, if that matters. Mail is in mbox format (we have too many sticklers who are set in their ways, unfortunately); I'm thinking default_mail_env should be mbox:~/Mail/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u. So, if I understand correctly, (a) I should set chroots on the mail processes, since some of our users don't have real shell accounts, and (b) those processes will need access to /var/mail and home directories under /home. So my best guess is that I should set the chroot variables like this: valid_chroot_dirs = /var/mail:/home mail_chroot = /var/mail I'm not sure about this though, for a number of reasons. Do I need to even chroot at all, or do I misunderstand the comments? If I do need to chroot, the comments about valid_chroot_dirs warn very strongly that the chroot dirs should not be writeable by users. /home itself isn't writeable by users, but obviously their home directories are. Is listing /home also vulnerable to exploits? If it is, what would a good solution be? What's the meaning of /./ in mail_chroot? The comments about it, unfortunately, make no sense at all to me. It says that /home/./user is the same as /home, but if that's completely true, why wouldn't I just say mail_chroot = /home? I even looked into the source and it still wasn't really clear to me. Thanks in advance for any help you can offer, -- -- Brett Smith

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[Dovecot] Lost messages with Mozilla and dovecot 0.99.x
by John Peacock 22 Sep '04

22 Sep '04

I have just moved our corporate e-mail over to qmail/dovecot and am very happy with the performance. However, I have had two reports of messages going missing which may or may not be directly related to Dovecot. I was able to observe this in action this morning: 1) I got the user out of their e-mail client (Mozilla 1.7.2) and forced an email to be delivered. It showed up in Maildir/new. 2) I had the user log in using our webmail (Squirrelmail) and the message was visible to the client (and correctly moved to Maildir/cur). 3) The user then logged in using the Mozilla mail client and not only was the message not visible in the client, it was no longer on the disk! 4) This was completely repeatable, even if I deleted the .INBOX/index files and forced dovecot to rebuild. For the moment I am thinking this is a client problem, but I thought I'd mention it just in case it rang a bell with someone. I wound up installing 0.99.11 just for grins (I just moved these people to the new server and don't want to risk 1.00-test yet). I'm also going to look at whatever debugging messages are available in dovecot; it would be useful to see a log of all imap transactions, not just login, so I could confirm that it is the client process requesting that the files be deleted and not somethink with dovecot itself (or some hardware failure). Thanks John -- John Peacock Director of Information Research and Technology Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4501 Forbes Boulevard Suite H Lanham, MD 20706 301-459-3366 x.5010 fax 301-429-5748

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[Dovecot] 1.0-test45
by Timo Sirainen 22 Sep '04

22 Sep '04

http://dovecot.org/test/ So, the last release was a stupid one. Here's a working one.

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[Dovecot] 1.0-test44
by Timo Sirainen 22 Sep '04

22 Sep '04

http://dovecot.org/test/ I think I finally fixed the hangs some people have been having when downloading mails. For some reason I could never reproduce this problem with Linux or Solaris, but with OpenBSD it happened immediately. Stupid problem with marking output buffer empty if it was full and write() returned EAGAIN. Other changes include: - LDAP initialization crashed - fixed some compiler warnings and some issues with 64bit systems - fixed some memory leaks What bugs are there left?

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[Dovecot] [Bug 124979] pam_succeed_if.so generates noisy secure syslog msgs (fwd)
by Kenneth Porter 22 Sep '04

22 Sep '04

For those of you using Dovecot on Fedora, the noisy syslog is fixed: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=124979 I'd suggest getting the pam SRPM from Rawhide (Fedora development tree) and rebuilding, to minimize dependency issues. (I haven't tried this yet. I'm just forwarding the bug-closing report.)

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[Dovecot] Nested folders
by Melinda Taylor 22 Sep '04

22 Sep '04

hello, I know this is a question that has probably been answered before but I have searched for the answer and am yet to find it. I am running dovecot under fedora core 2 and cannot figure out where I set it so that users can create nested folders. At the moment they can only create one subfolder in most mail clients. however if using squirrelmail they can create nested folders but the folder whicch hosts the subfolders cannot contain mail messages as well as folders. Is this a setting in IMAP or with the mail clients. Many Thanks, melinda

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[Dovecot] utime() failed with index file [...] Operation not permitted
by Stephan Jakoubek 21 Sep '04

21 Sep '04

Hello, I'm running the dovecot backports from jones.dk. Everything is working fine so far, but whenever someone is logging in (IMAP or POP 3) I get the following error message in my mail.log: [...] pop3(frederik): utime() failed with index file /var/mboxes/frederik/.INBOX/.imap.index: Operation not permitted [...] imap(jako1): utime() failed with index file /var/mboxes/jako1/.INBOX/.imap.index: Operation not permitted Rights for the ".imap.index" file are: -rwxrwxrwx 1 Debian-e mailserv 3792 Sep 21 11:50 .imap.index Thank you very much for your support. -Stephan

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[Dovecot] problems building / starting test40 + test42
by Curtis Maloney 21 Sep '04

21 Sep '04

Hi I was trying to build test40 (and then test42, since it came out in the mean time) on my fresh Solaris 9 box at home, and ran into a few snags. First problem was during the build. Make spat the dummy in the auth directory: Making all in auth make: Fatal error in reader: Makefile, line 701: Unexpected end of line seen Current working directory /home/pkg/dovecot-1.0-test42/src/auth So, I went and checked it out, to find what certainly looked to me like an error: 697:distclean-generic clean-generic maintainer-clean-generic clean \ 698:mostlyclean distclean maintainer-clean 699: 700: checkpassword-reply.c 701: 702:# Tell versions [3.59,3.63) of GNU make to not export all variables. Originally, I tried tacking that onto the end of the preceding list, but when the next problem came about, I tried commenting it out... with no joy. The next problem was in starting it. I've configured Dovecot before, and it runs great, keeping all the users at my work happy and supplied with spa... erm... e-mail. I also have an older test version installed on an old SparcStation 5 at home. But when I try to start it, it complains of not being able to drop root group privileges. I googled about for a bit, and found mention of ensuring the minimum GID level was set right... but still no joy. I'm at a loss. Any suggestions? Any requests for better info to help debug? -- Curtis Maloney cmaloney(a)cardgate.net

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[Dovecot] /etc/init.d init script for RedHat?
by Benjamin J. Weiss 20 Sep '04

20 Sep '04

Is anybody using dovecot on RHEL 3? I'd sure appreciate an init script for it. Thanks! Ben

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[Dovecot] Trying to install Test43 with rpmbuild
by Benjamin J. Weiss 20 Sep '04

20 Sep '04

Hi! I'm using WhiteBox Enterprise Linux 3.0, which is a re-compile distro of RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0. I'm installing a new mail server and would like to use dovecot as it supports Maildir, which the default imapd does not. I've downloaded test43's tarball, and would prefer to use RPM to manage it. To that end, I've tried to do an rpmbuild, but get an error: [root@www src]# rpmbuild -ta dovecot-1.0-test43.tar.gz error: line 7: Illegal char '-' in version: Version: 1.0-test43 I tried untaring the tarball and looking at the dovecot.spec file, and sure enough on line 7 is a reference to "Version: 1.0-test43". The problem is that if I take out the '-', and try rpmbuild, I get more errors. I'm not an expert in this stuff...has anybody else managed to get this working? It would sure make my life easier (I think). Ben

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