[Dovecot] Authentication process holding open filehandles

[George Barnett]

Hi,

We're using dovecot to provide pop3 for a number of mailboxes.  The setup is pretty simple:

Each user / domain has a mailstore in /data/mailstore/<domain>/<user>/Maildir (backed by NFS).

Passwords are in simple passwd-file format in the top level domain directory eg:

# cat /data/mailstore/foo.com/.passwd 
user:{plain}password

The passdb setup looks like this.

passdb {
  args = username_format=%n /data/mailstore/%d/.passwd
  driver = passwd-file
}

The problem we're having is that when we want to remove a domain from the system and we go to rm -rf /data/mailstore/<domain>/ we are unable to because the auth process is still holding onto the file handles for the password file.

Can somebody suggest an alternative pattern that I could use for storing password files?  Ideally, we'd avoid one large file to prevent locking issues and would also keep the passwd-file setup since it's simple.

It would be possible to have the password files in a separate dir, but over time I'm guessing that would lead to nfs turds?  Easy to clean up I suppose, but maybe there's a simpler solution I'm missing?

George