[Dovecot] joys of transition.

[Eric S. Johansson]

Timo Sirainen explained:

> Well, that's as informative as you can get from PAM :) It means that PAM 
> decided the password was wrong. Do you have /etc/pam.d/imap file set up 
> correctly?

don't know if it is correct but it is stock Red Hat.  one more item for the 
install instructions.

[root at harvee doc]# more /etc/pam.d/imap
#%PAM-1.0
auth       required  /lib/security/pam_stack.so service=system-auth
account    required  /lib/security/pam_stack.so service=system-auth
[root at harvee doc]#

> Either your client is stupid or it tries to work around stupid servers. 
> LOGIN command should be accepted by all servers and "login" SASL 
> mechanism is some old not-really-standard.

I think I would choose the "stupid" option.  I am using Mozilla 1.4 (the imap 
client on windows that sucks the least).

>> Fatal: Error in configuration file /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf line 
>> 430: Unknown setting: methods
> 
> 
> Um.. You must have had at least one auth_methods line before or it 
> wouldn't have worked.. And the default dovecot-example.conf contained 
> only plain there.

I think I understand.  I screwed up my authentication definition because it 
wasn't clear.  On a stock Red Hat system using password authentication, what 
works is:

auth_userdb = passwd
auth_passdb = shadow

and leave the digest_md5 stuff alone (which I turned on in my confusion).  But 
*yay* dovecot is working for me!  Now all I need to do is turn on my inbox 
properly (and reclaim my 3300 messages from the old inbox) and I will be a happy 
camper.

> Yes, I have plans to write them .. before 1.0 :)

ya right... just like my intention to rewrite the camram antispam system 
documentation/web site.  It's at least a year out of date but at least I have 
working code for sender pays antispam with some other nice features 
accommodating the real world.

> Yea, there really should be some easier ways to manage your own CAs. I 
> found some certificate manager written with Qt (can't remember name), 
> but something web based could be nice too.

I've been very happy with TinyCA.  It's written in perl and uses tk for the GUI. 
  It's not full featured but I found it hard to do things wrong.  On the other 
hand, that might be a side effect of the scar tissue.  ;-)

anyway, as I said above, I now have things working (more or less) and I will 
find out how well the indexing works as I gradually open different mailboxes on 
demand.  I may play with maildir mailboxes if I can mix and match mbox and 
maildir in the same directory.  playing the fire?

---eric