dovecot virtual users with sendmail, my solution

[Christopher McCrory]

Hello...

I wanted to use dovecot virtual users with sendmail. As you probably know,
this doesn't work by default.  The more scalable solution is probably to
use LDAP, but I really don't like it.  This is how I did it
https://github.com/chrismcc-gmail/dovecot-virtual-sendmail

Basically I abused glibc's db feature in /etc/nsswitch

in /var/db/Makefile something like this:

$(VAR_DB)/passwd.db: /etc/dovecot/usersfile
  @printf %s "$(patsubst %.db,%,$(@F))... "
  @$(AWK) 'BEGIN { FS=":"; OFS=":" } \
  /^[ \t]*$$/ { next } \
  /^[ \t]*#/ { next } \
  /^root/ { next } \
  /^[^#]/ { printf ".%s ", $$1; \
printf "%s:x:65534:65534:%s:/home/vmail/%s:/sbin/nologin\n", $$1, $$1, $$1;
\
                            }' $^ | \
  $(MAKEDB) -o $@ -
@echo "done."

make -C /var/db
getent passwd ; shows
...
virtualuser:x:65534:65534:virtualuser:/home/vmail/virtualuser:/sbin/nologin
othervuser:x:65534:65534:othervuser:/home/vmail/othervuser:/sbin/nologin

A longer explanation and more info is in the github repository
It takes about 10 minutes to go from new clean server to working email
server with this
I've been running this in production for about a week now without any
problems.

Question:
Has anyone else done this? I don't see any downsides, but I might be
missing something.


-- 
Christopher McCrory
To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
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