[dovecot] Re: Dotlocking doesn't work?

[Ian R. Justman]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-03-19 at 16:04, Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote:
> 
>>>>> Files in the above dir are group mail, and the dir is group mail.  However,
>>>>>all binaries in /usr/lib/dovecot are root/root.  I have set them all to g+s,
>>>>>and group mail, and now the imap process can lock the INBOX.
>>>>
>>Is dotlocking still  a work in progress or are we missing something here?
> 
> 
> Only solution for now is to set /var/mail world-writable and sticky.
> 
> Another way would be to use more privileged process for handling lock
> files. Some programs use setuid or setgid binary for that. I was
> thinking that I'd let imap process request the locks from master
> process. That would also allow overriding stale lock files created by
> other users with shared mailboxes.

On this tack, this problem bit me yesterday when I migrated one of my 
public-access machines from Qpopper to Dovecot on the POP3 side of 
things.  The best way I could solve this, until something can be done 
for dotlocking is to use fcntl(2) for now.

Though I seem to remember some manner of warnings using fcntl(2). 
However, since none of my systems use NFS for their mailstores, I felt 
this is safe enough.  Any thoughts on this matter?

--Ian.