[ILUG] dovecot permission denied problems.

[John Mc Donald]

I am trying to setup dovecot on a FC4 machine. Access to the machine is
provided through pam. When I login to the machine my home directory is
mounted over nfs from a central file server. I have dovecot installed
and running but it can't seem to access my home directory. When I try
and access my mail I get the following three lines in /var/log/maillog:

> Jul 25 12:46:04 escher imap-login: Login: ###### [::ffff:###.###.###.###]
> Jul 25 12:46:04 escher dovecot: chdir(/home/######) failed with uid
> ####: Permission denied
> Jul 25 12:46:04 escher dovecot: child 13182 (imap) returned error 89

The uid that is used is the one associated with my home directory. As
far as I understand it when you connect to dovecot the imap connection
setuid's to the uid of the authenticated user so there should be no
permission problems.

To try and help in the debugging process I also setup a local user
"testimap" using

> /usr/sbin/useradd -d /tmp/testimap testimap

I then try to use thunderbird to connect to it and I get the following
in /var/log/maillog

> Jul 25 12:54:54 escher imap-login: Login: testimap
> [::ffff:###.###.###.###]
> Jul 25 12:54:54 escher imap(testimap): mbox: Can't create root IMAP
> folder /tmp/testimap/mail: Permission denied
> Jul 25 12:54:54 escher imap(testimap): MAIL environment missing and
> autodetection failed (home /tmp/testimap)
> Jul 25 12:54:54 escher dovecot: child 13360 (imap) returned error 89

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong here?

TIA,
John.

-- 
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John Mc Donald,
Dept. of Computer Science,
National University of Ireland,
Maynooth,
Co. Kildare,
Ireland.

Email : johnmcd at cs.nuim.ie
Tel: +353-1-7084589
Fax: +353-1-7083848
Web: http://www.cs.nuim.ie/~johnmcd
GnuPG Key: http://www.cs.nuim.ie/~johnmcd/public_key.asc
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