[Dovecot] Dovecot under daemontools

[dale gallagher]

Hi there

I'm having difficulties in getting dovecot to run under daemontools. Also,
from a sysadmin perspective, so far, I find dovecot's config rather complex
- I suppose that's what happens when one attempts to appease all
authentication methods... anyway, I digress.

System details, to set the scene:

OS: Slackware Linux
Linux Kernel: 2.4.29
GCC: 3.2.2
Dovecot version: 1.0.rc6
Dovecot configure options:
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
--with-checkpassword --without-passwd --without-passwd-file --without-shadow
--without-pam --without-bsdauth --without-gssapi --without-ldap
--without-vpopmail --with-prefetch-userdb --without-sql --without-pgsql
--without-mysql --with-ssl=openssl --without-pop3d --with-storages=maildir
--without-deliver
MTA: qmail
Storage: Maildirs under a single virtual user (vmail)
Checkpassword: /var/qmail/bin/qmail-vpoplogin (modified cdb checkpassword)
User DB: /var/qmail/users/vpasswd.cdb

/etc/dovecot.conf

base_dir protocols listen ssl_disable shutdown_clients log_path login_dir maildir_copy_with_hardlinks protocol imap {
  # only require access from webmail on same host
  listen }
auth default {
  passdb checkpassword {
    args   }
  userdb prefetch {
  }
  # user who can access user/passwd db
  user }

Firstly, I cannot run dovecot as an unprivileged user, as the OS moans that
the user doesn't have permission to write to /dev/stderr. I've had a similar
issue running Clamav, but a patch to Clamav resolved this? This seems to be
related to referencing /dev/stderr directly. Any ideas?

Should I be running dovecot as the virtual mailbox user vmail?

Before I ramble on about what I've tried, could someone explain to me what
dovecot actually does, in terms of privilege separation? The online docs are
somewhat convoluted. This would help shed light on the solution.

I also noticed the posts re daemontools some time ago, yet they do not
include any setup solutions etc - I'd appreciate details from those of you
who've succeeded in this regard.

Thanks
Dale
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20060810/0cc391ab/attachment.html