- dovecot - dovecot.org

[dovecot] Thread extension
by Timo Sirainen 09 Jan '03

09 Jan '03

Just figured I'd mention that CVS supports now THREAD extension. I also did a bit of benchmarking using a folder with 4685 mails (evolution mailing list): dovecot+mbox: - 0.59s user 0.01s system 98% cpu 0.608 total - malloc() memory usage 45072 -> 825685 dovecot+maildir: - 0.60s user 0.17s system 98% cpu 0.780 total - malloc() memory usage: 45003 -> 825480 Meaning it takes almost 800kbytes of memory and it's quite fast :) Comparing to other servers then: uw-imap: - 1.11s user 0.27s system 100% cpu 1.376 total - malloc() memory usage: 529408 -> ~4348k courier: - 7.27s user 0.28s system 99% cpu 7.567 total - malloc() memory usage: 181689 -> ~850k cyrus: - 1.403 total (through TCP connection, I couldn't figure out how to start it separately) Whoa, we beat everyone :) Courier uses a bit less memory though, but that's most likely because we allocate it in larger chunks which is faster. I ran the tests several times and picked the best values, although the changes were minimal once they got the messages into OS's cache. Also it looks like I've found a couple of bugs in uw-imap and courier's implementation..

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[dovecot] Re: Logging suggestions?
by Jesse Peterson 08 Jan '03

08 Jan '03

-------- Original Message -------- From: - Wed Jan 08 15:28:42 2003 X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00800000 Message-ID: <3E1CB429.3040704(a)attbi.com> Date: Wed, 08 Jan 2003 15:28:41 -0800 From: Jesse Peterson <jpeterson275(a)attbi.com> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020901 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Timo Sirainen <tss(a)iki.fi> Subject: Re: [dovecot] Re: Logging suggestions? References: <1042022871.28651.93.camel@hurina> <20030108175006.GB27418(a)dust.uchicago.edu> <20030108181142.GB12010(a)talsever.com> <1042066760.28651.144.camel@hurina> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Timo Sirainen wrote: > > Something like that, yes. I'd like to avoid adding too many (mostly) > useless options though. > Make it customizable! =) Maybe something similar to Apache LogFormat-style or similar? Just a suggestion, -- Jesse Peterson / jesse(a)pixeltechs.com -- Jesse Peterson / jesse(a)pixeltechs.com

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[dovecot] Logging suggestions?
by Timo Sirainen 08 Jan '03

08 Jan '03

Any suggestions how user login/logouts should look like in log files? I was thinking: (connected to imaps port) Login: username [IP 1.2.3.4, imaps, compressed] Logout: username [IP 1.2.3.4, imaps, compressed] [1000/100000 bytes (50%), 00:00:12] Bytes being upload/download and the 50% meaning compression ratio for downloaded bytes, probably not worth it for upload. Or if uncompressed, it'd show the extra space used by SSL/TLS protocol: (using STARTTLS) Login: username [IP 1.2.3.4, TLS] Logout: username [IP 1.2.3.4, TLS] [2020/202000 bytes (101%), 00:00:12] (no SSL) Login: username [IP 1.2.3.4] Logout: username [IP 1.2.3.4] [2000/200000 bytes, 00:00:12] I think the only configuration needed would be if to log login, logout or both.

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[dovecot] Bug#175509: dovecot: init.d script should add some syslog statements on startup/shutdown (fwd)
by Jaldhar H. Vyas 08 Jan '03

08 Jan '03

[Amelia and Timo. As you are both on the dovecot list, I'm replying there to avoid cluttering up your inboxes.] This bug was reported to Debian but I feel it should be fixed upstream. Adding logging in th init script itself would require adding additional dependencies to the package and not be as convenient. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing(a)talsever.com> It would be nice if the init.d script could add some statements in the system log on startup and shutdown. For postfix, postfix-script (called from the init script) uses: starting the Postfix mail system stopping the Postfix mail system These are useful; one can start the daemon and check that it's initialized (netstat works as well, I suppose, but this is still useful docco). -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar(a)debian.org>

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[dovecot] Re: Bug#175507: dovecot: Accidental denial of service via syslog
by Jaldhar H. Vyas 08 Jan '03

08 Jan '03

This bug was reported to Debian but I feel it is an upstream issue. On Sat, 4 Jan 2003, Amelia A Lewis wrote: > If dovecot is misconfigured, such that imap-auth cannot find passwd.imap > (which probably needs to get copied; maybe need more docco in the config > file? This happens if the digest-md5 auth method is uncommented and the > auth_userinfo is set to passwd-file /etc/passwd.imap), imap-auth dies once a > second with error 89, which it reports to imap-master, and both log to > syslog. > > I've got 30,000 line pairs from a ten hour run. I would think that if it > dies more than, say, a thousand times in a single hour, imap-master maybe > ought to consider that there's a serious configuration problem preventing > use, and exit instead of continuing to fill the log. > > Granted, it's a shoot-yourself sort of error. But still ... after a certain > point, the program ought to be able to die *gracefully* if the sysadmin has > shot it, by accident or not. > Personally, I would be even stricter than Amelia is suggesting. If there is a serious configuration error, dovecot should die immediately. -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar(a)debian.org>

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[dovecot] Bug reports from Debian BTS
by Jaldhar H. Vyas 08 Jan '03

08 Jan '03

Timo, Are you (or any other interested list readers for that matter) interested in directly receiving bug reports about dovecot sent to Debian? If you are, you can go to http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/dovecot.html and sign up to have notifications sent to you or the list or wherever. Or I can screen them and only send you ones I think are relevant as I'm doing now. -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar(a)debian.org> It's a girl! See the pictures - http://www.braincells.com/shailaja/

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[dovecot] 0.99.6rc1 released
by Timo Sirainen 06 Jan '03

06 Jan '03

Again rc, just in case I broke something. Or maybe I should just start creating nightly CVS snapshots. Anyway, fixes the few bugs people have reported lately: - Mails with nested MIME parts might have caused incorrect BODY and BODYSTRUCTURE fetches and sometimes might have crashed dovecot (assert at imap-bodystructure.c). If client had already successfully done the BODY fetching a couple of times, the bug couldn't happen anymore since Dovecot then began caching the BODY data. So, this mostly happened with new users. - If authentication was aborted by client ("*" reply to AUTHENTICATE), the login process crashed later. - Digest-MD5: We used "qop-options" instead of "qop", which was incompatible with at least Cyrus SASL. - We didn't work with some 64bit systems - Realms in passwd-file were buggy * Some coding style changes (less typedefs)

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[dovecot] Assert in imap-bodystructure.c
by Brad Figg 06 Jan '03

06 Jan '03

First let me thank you for my initial newby question about poping from a pop3 server and delivering into my Dovecot maildir folders. Now I'm getting an assertion in imap-bodystructure.c and one of my imap folders is now inaccessable. I think the two are related. Whenever I select the folder from my email client (kmail) I get two log entries in the dovecot log of the format: "imap-master: <date>Error: child <pid> (imap) killed with signal 6" Also in the log are several lines with an assertion failure. I've included a portion of the log below. I am running dovecot 0.99.5. Thanks, Brad ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- imap-master: Jan 06 08:38:44Error: child 22222 (imap) killed with signal 6 imap(brad): Jan 06 08:46:28Panic: file imap-bodystructure.c: line 346 (part_write_body): assertion failed: (part->children->next == NULL) imap-master: Jan 06 08:46:28Error: child 22262 (imap) killed with signal 6 imap(brad): Jan 06 08:53:01Panic: file imap-bodystructure.c: line 346 (part_write_body): assertion failed: (part->children->next == NULL) imap(brad): Jan 06 08:53:01Panic: file imap-bodystructure.c: line 346 (part_write_body): assertion failed: (part->children->next == NULL) imap-master: Jan 06 08:53:01Error: child 22273 (imap) killed with signal 6 imap-master: Jan 06 08:53:01Error: child 22270 (imap) killed with signal 6

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[dovecot] Weird problem on Alpha
by Amelia A.Lewis 06 Jan '03

06 Jan '03

Heyas ... Hope you aren't tired of me already .... I have a very strange problem, I think. Having become happy-happy with dovecot, I decided to install it on another machine that runs on an internal network and provides mailboxes for system monitoring. The setup is, or should be, quite straightforward. TLS is disabled, plaintext is not (I'll change this later, probably; this way is in theory easier to debug). Maildir; the MAIL environment variable is correctly set. Authentication via pam, for real users on the system, auth_user root. Pretty much as-distributed, except for disabling TLS. On attempted login, the client hangs. The following two messages appear in syslog: Jan 5 21:42:43 talifane imap-master: login: received another "not listening" notification Jan 5 21:43:43 talifane imap-login: Disconnected: Inactivity [127.0.0.1] Watching on lo via tcpdump, interesting things happen. If I login with the wrong password, the disconnect is quick (the message in syslog is different, just "Disconnected [127.0.0.1]" from imap-login). The server responds to the a0001 LOGIN command with a0001 NO Authentication failed. That's as expected. If I give the correct password, though, the server never responds. Note that the 'not listening' message appears sixty seconds before the disconnection for inactivity message. In tcpdump, it's clear that the client never gets anything that would give it reason to try another command. So ... have I managed to pull a total bimbo and misconfigure? Or is this a problem with the Alpha platform? I wanted to check before reporting a bug, but this is kinda strange, since it's about the simplest configuration that I can think of. Suggestions (for testing, or for fixing) would be welcome. Is there a way to start the daemon in a particularly verbose mode? In case it's useful, here's what the debian reportbug system generates for dependencies and stuff (0.99.5-1): -- System Information: Debian Release: testing/unstable Architecture: alpha Kernel: Linux talifane 2.4.19 #1 Sat Aug 3 10:33:38 EDT 2002 alpha Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US Versions of packages dovecot depends on: ii libc6.1 2.3.1-9 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an ii libgcrypt1 1.1.10-2 LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr ii libgnutls5 0.6.0-2 GNU TLS library - runtime library ii libpam0g 0.76-9 Pluggable Authentication Modules l ii libtasn1-0 0.1.2-1 Manage ASN.1 structures (runtime) ii openssl 0.9.6g-10 Secure Socket Layer (SSL) binary a ii zlib1g 1:1.1.4-8 compression library - runtime It's specifically a PC164LX/533, 512MB RAM. Thanks for reading. Amy! -- Amelia A. Lewis amyzing {at} talsever.com You like the taste of danger, it shines like sugar on your lips, and you like to stand in the line of fire just to show you can shoot straight from your hip. There must be a 1000 things you would die for; I can hardly think of two. -- Emily Saliers

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[dovecot] wierdness with mailboxes
by David E. Storey 06 Jan '03

06 Jan '03

Mail has always been the bane of my sys-admin life. I've been looking long and hard for a small, C-based, simple IMAP server that worked well with maildirs *and* mboxes and nothing else. wu-imap is so bloated and rife with decrepit, cross-platform, insecure code that I avoid it for any new servers. Courier-imap only supports maildirs but has some wierdnesses that I've come to live with. dovecot promises to be exactly what I'm looking for with just the right footprint and feature-set. =) I was surprised when I tried creating subfolders of mbox's. woohoo! The only problem is that dovecot manages to rename the parent, appending a '.'. So when we have: folder we now have: folder. folder.subfolder Evolution freaks out and thinks it can't store folders in 'folder.' and ends up with two subfolders: null and subfolder, which can contain messages. If I rename the parent folder without the trailing '.', everything works as expected. I'm trying to test some other imap clients now. d!

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