[Dovecot] exim and /var/run/dovecot/auth-client permissions

[John Connett]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:45:42 -0000, John Connett  
<john.connett at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I am attempting to configure a dovecot 2.0 + exim + fetchmail (demon)  
> combination on openSUSE 11.4, initially with the standard dovecot  
> package (2.0.9-3.4-x86_64) and now with the later server:mail build  
> service package (2.0.11-1.1-x86_64).
>
> I followed the instructions in  
> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/HowTo/EximAndDovecotSASL but despite the  
> changes in conf.d/10-master.conf the permissions on  
> /var/run/dovecot/auth-client remain unchanged:
>
> $ ls -l /var/run/dovecot/auth-client
> Srw------- 1 root root 0 Mar 14 13:11 /var/run/dovecot/auth-client
> $
>
> This is probably the cause of authentication failures from exim.  I  
> suspect it is something trivial but haven't yet been able to find the  
> answer.

Confirmed that the permissions are the source of the authentication  
failures by manually changing to mode=0660, user=mail.  These permissions  
revert to mode=0600, user=root when dovecot is restarted.

The problem is either with the instructions on the wiki or within  
dovecot.  I will look at the source code to see if I can identify why the  
permissions in conf.d/10-master.conf are not being applied.  The "service  
auth" part of conf.d/10-master.conf, stripped of comments, is:

service auth {
   unix_listener auth-client {
     mode = 0660
     user = mail
   }
   unix_listener auth-userdb {
   }
}