please help this newbie get started

[Christian Kivalo]

Am 5. Februar 2017 06:55:34 MEZ schrieb drbobllc at yahoo.com:
>Hi, everyone,
>1. As advised in Debugging Authentication, I turned on auth_debug and
>auth_debug_passwords, and now in the mail log I get an additional
>message:
>dovecot: auth: passwd(xxx,xxx,<40AjQMFHSLVLGJAC>): invalid password
>field '*'
>Of course neither the password I tried nor the actual password was '*'.
>That's what's in /etc/passwd, but dovecot isn't just using that, is it?
The '*' in passwd password field stands for login disabled. See man 5 passwd or http://www.manpages.info/freebsd/passwd.5.html


>2. In the new debug log, I get:
>dovecot: auth: Debug: Loading modules from directory:
>/usr/local/lib/dovecot/auth
>dovecot: auth: Debug: Read auth token secret from
>/var/run/dovecot/auth-token-secret.dat
>dovecot: auth: Debug: auth client connected (pid=3183)
>dovecot: auth: Debug: client in: AUTH    1    PLAIN    service=pop3   
>session=RFp0lMFHHotLGJAC    lip=xxx    rip=xxx    lport=110   
>rport=35614
>dovecot: auth: Debug: client passdb out: CONT    1    
>dovecot: auth: Debug: client in: CONT<hidden>
>dovecot: auth: Debug: passwd(xxx,xxx,<RFp0lMFHHotLGJAC>): lookup
>dovecot: auth: Debug: client passdb out: FAIL    1    user=xxx   
>user_disabled
>
>So it's something with passdb?
>
>3. In TestPop3Installation I can't get past the "Check that it's
>allowing remote logins" section. telnet gives me an error:
>
>-ERR [AUTH] Authentication failed.
>
>
>which I expect, because I have telnet turned off. Does that mean I
>can't use plaintext authentication?
This is probably because the users login is disabled.

In one oft your provided log outputs you are trying to login as user 'www'. Why? The webserver user has the login normaly disabled.

-- 
Christian Kivalo

>Thanks,
>Bob
>
>On Saturday, February 4, 2017 8:37 AM, "drbobllc at yahoo.com"
><drbobllc at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>And thanks for the link to that Troubleshooting section. I didn't know
>that was there and will take a look at it now.
>