From: Phil Howard (no email)
Date: Mon Jul 01 2002 - 11:48:03 EDT
On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 10:56:21AM -0400, wrote:
| On Mon, 1 Jul 2002, Phil Howard wrote:
|
| > I am trying to virtualize the users on a new mail server.
| > What I mean by that is that the user names will not be listed
| > in the /etc/passwd file. There is another file which looks
| > like the first 2 fields of /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow which
| > contains the list of valid users. The main question is how
| > might I get Postfix to check this file for known users?
|
| This is the wrong question. The right question is:
|
| What delivery agent and POP/IMAP server combination should I use to
| deliver mail to users without a shell account (not listed in /etc/passwd)?
The POP server is already chosen.
The answer to this question will be interesting for the next project.
But there is a different set of requirements for that one. I can post
them if you would like to offer advice on that.
| For a specific choice of delivery agent and POP/IMAP server, what is the
| best way to manage the virtual user account information?
|
| Is it possible to enter the virtual user accounts into just one
| database that will be used by all components ("smtpd" user validation,
| delivery agent, POP/IMAP server)?
|
|
| The most important factor is your choice of POP/IMAP server. Some can be
| integrated tightly with Postfix and some cannot.
|
| Your best bet is likely (I am not an expert on this topic, this is
| my impression from recent posts to the list) Courier IMAP. There is a
| patch for Postfix to enable it to use "userdb" as a Postfix map type.
| Check some of the Courier HOWTO documents recently advertised on the list.
| If none provide sufficient detail, perhaps someone can volunteer the
| missing recipes.
Courier IMAP did not meet migration requirements for this server.
Mailbox format is required in this case so that user mail is not
lost. I will be using rsync to syncronize the mailboxes from the
old machine to the new one, then transfer IP addresses and restart.
The POP server used is vm-pop3d. It is past the time to allocate
the additional time to change the software used or to work out the
strategy to change from mailbox to maildir format. Physical move of
servers takes place 13 July. The migration must take place at the
maintenance window allocated for least user disruption.
For another project as mentioned above, Courier IMAP appears to be
a good choice. I don't know what you mean by "userdb", but then I
haven't gotten to the point of fully RTFM-ing Courier IMAP, yet.
Maybe this will all be obvious at that time.
| Postfix has no support for "password-like" maps except /etc/passwd
| accessed via getpwnam(3).
So the workaround is to have 2 maps, one for vm-pop3d to look up its
passwords, another for postfix to verify the existance of users. It's
something I wanted to avoid, but I have changed to another strategy
to manage accounts on this machine. It's quick and dirty. Each user
has a single file in a directory. The file contains their password.
These files are collected to construct the two needed files (and then
postmap is run to generate the hash db file Postfix will use).
At this point, Postfix is not recognizing users in the file even
though it is specified in local_recipient_maps. I just started
working on this so I haven't vetted all the possible errors, yet.
But it looks as though local_recipient_maps has no effect as it
still recognizes users that do happen to be in /etc/passwd.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | Phil Howard - KA9WGN | Dallas | http://linuxhomepage.com/ | | | Texas, USA | http://phil.ipal.org/ | ----------------------------------------------------------------- - To unsubscribe, send mail to with content (not subject): unsubscribe postfix-users
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