[Dovecot] joys of transition.

[Eric S. Johansson]

Red Hat 8.0
stock dovecot 99.10

for a variety of reasons, I decided to cut over to dovecot this morning.  I 
extracted all of my mailboxes from mbx purgatory back to mbox purgatory, set up 
dovecot and proceed to get authentication failures.  (am using simple password 
based authentication either direct or through pam)

I turned authentication verbosity on and got:
Aug 14 11:51:38 harvee dovecot: Dovecot starting up
Aug 14 11:51:46 harvee dovecot-auth: PAM: pam_authenticate(esj) failed: 
Authentication failure
Aug 14 11:51:49 harvee dovecot-auth: PAM: pam_authenticate(esj) failed: 
Authentication failure
Aug 14 11:51:52 harvee imap-login: Aborted login [192.168.0.10]

not very informative.  I already know that I can't login.  So I fire up ethereal 
and capture the following transaction:

* OK dovecot ready.
1 authenticate login
1 NO Unsupported authentication mechanism.
2 login "esj" "no peeking"
2 NO Authentication failed.
3 authenticate login
3 NO Unsupported authentication mechanism.
4 login "esj" "no peeking"
4 NO Authentication failed.
5 logout
* BYE Logging out
5 OK Logout completed.

hmm no unsupported authentication mechanism.  So that means all authentication 
methods works right? ;-)

looking a little further into the configuration, I see instructions to change 
auth_methods to add plain in front of digest-md5 (or is it digest_md5, both 
forms are present in the configuration file).  No luck.  Doing so gives me the 
following error message:

Fatal: Error in configuration file /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf line 430: Unknown 
setting: methods

so, I'm not sure what to look for.  It's probably something simple but googling 
didn't reveal anything pertinent although it turned up something amusing[1]and 
dovecot does apply.

Suggestions or clues would be welcome.

FYI, you probably could use a little bit more detail in the install 
instructions.  For example instructing user to create a dovecot user and group 
name would be useful as would be a startup/shutdown script for init.d.  I also 
find the SSL configuration lacking.  On the other hand, I have enough scar 
tissue from certificates and mini-CA setups to hate them till the end of time. 
If I get them working better, I'll document and send it to the list.

---eric

[1]http://www.oblomovka.com/eldritch/iag/ob1-5.htm