[Dovecot] automounting home dirs

[Roger Hale]

> > I'm running dovecot-1.0.10 on a Solaris 10 server with home dirs
> > automounted over NFS. I have set the mail_location configuration
> > option so that nothing should be written to a user's home dir over
> > NFS but, as far as I can tell, dovecot still by default tries to
> > chdir to a user's home dir when reading mail, although this is not
> > required. This creates additional unnecessary load on a
> > heavily-loaded fileserver and generally slows everything down and
> > creates an unnecessary dependency.
> > 
> > Is there a way to prevent dovecot from causing the home dirs to be
> > mounted?
> 
> You can override the home dir returned by your userdb with a 
> variable-expanded, "static" value by adding home to args[1].  You need 
> to be careful and make sure that Dovecot doesn't use anything in the 
> users' home dirs.  You may need to set mail_location and/or mail and 
> create a virtual home-dir tree local to the Dovecot server.

Thanks. Are you suggesting I add something like the following?
userdb static {
  args = home=/some/random/dir
}
Incidentally, what I really wanted was for the user's home dir only to be mounted for imap connections (when it could be usefully used), not POP3. I thought by moving the indexes dir this would just happen.

 
> Posting `dovecot -n` output would help.

# 1.0.10: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf
protocols: imap imaps pop3s
disable_plaintext_auth: no
login_dir: /usr/local/var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3-login
mail_extra_groups: mail
mail_location: mbox:/var/mail/.mboxes/%u:INBOX=/var/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/mail/.indexes/%u
mail_debug: yes
mmap_disable: yes
mail_executable(default): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap
mail_executable(imap): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap
mail_executable(pop3): /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/pop3
mail_plugin_dir(default): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap
mail_plugin_dir(imap): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/imap
mail_plugin_dir(pop3): /usr/local/lib/dovecot/pop3
pop3_reuse_xuidl(default): no
pop3_reuse_xuidl(imap): no
pop3_reuse_xuidl(pop3): yes
pop3_uidl_format(default):
pop3_uidl_format(imap):
pop3_uidl_format(pop3): %08Xv%08Xu
auth default:
  mechanisms: plain login
  passdb:
    driver: pam
  userdb:
    driver: passwd


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