[Dovecot] pop3 gives a permission denied error on chdir

[Kenneth Gonsalves]

On Wednesday 20 May 2009 18:49:25 Steffen Kaiser wrote:
> Well, there are lots of "permission denied" problems lately.
>
> Are you really absolutely sure that user with uid 5000 may chdir into
> /home/vmail/example.com/john ??
>
> I mean, make sure "su" may set uid to the user of UID 5000 (esp. the shell
> is a real shell, so (as root) # su user -c "echo OK"
> displays "OK", then do as root #
>
> su user -c 'cd /home/vmail/example.com/john && echo Dir:$(pwd)'

greenchilly:/home/lawgon# su vmail -c "echo OK"
OK
greenchilly:/home/lawgon# su vmail -c 'cd /home/vmail/example.com/john && echo 
Dir:$(pwd)'
Dir:/home/vmail/example.com/john

>
> (and revert what you've did for testing on success)
>
> Do run some protection stuff, e.g. SELinux or AppArmor or the like?
> Dovecot setuid()'s to uid 5000, then chdir()s there. Such stuff may
> prohibit this.

no - and note that I use dovecot for LDA and dovecot as vmail has no problem 
delivering mail (which means it can read and write in that directory)
>
> Or, do you have ACLs enabled in the filesystem? Or do you use a remote
> filesystem, which permissions probably lie to the client.

no - of course this is a VPS on a Gandi xen setup, but I do not see how 
anything is affected by this
>
> Are all files in /home/vmail/example.com/john owned by uid 5000 and r/w?

yes
> No dead sym links, etc.pp?

no. 

-- 
regards
Kenneth Gonsalves
Associate
NRC-FOSS
http://nrcfosshelpline.in/web/