[Gllug] Large mail files was -> RedHat

[Dave Cridland]

On Mon, 2001-11-05 at 12:20, Steve Nicholson wrote:
> > I have all my mail on a Cyrus IMAP server. Here, I have a GLLUG folder
> 
> Cyrus IMAP server is something I have wanted to set up for a while, have
> read good things about it, time is my issue at the moment, 4 weeks and
> I'm off home for 3 months and there are a lot of other things I need to
> get sorted out so everything is reliable (and recoverable) while I'm
> away.

Cyrus is very good, very fast, and very stable.

> How long did it take to set up the IMAP server?  Are there any
> gotcatchas in there?

You want to run it on some kind of Journalling FS for best results, or
else you'll need to chattr +S a few places. Which is the downside.

Of course, you can ignore this, but at your peril - Cyrus doesn't like
the FileSystem from vanishing beneath it in mid-write very much at all.

The other gotcha with cyrus is that, of course, you can't then read
email on the server itself. Only via IMAP or POP3 (of course, you can
read email that way on the server, but you know what I mean).

Also, the IMAP/POP3 "INBOX" doesn't exist by default. A real bugger.
It's possible to configure Cyrus such that these can be created by the
user, but realistically, you want to create them when you install. I
suggest using the "imtest" program in the distribution, giving it a
preprepared IMAP script, generated by a suitable script run over
/etc/passwd or `ls /var/spool/mail`, at your choice. (You need a file
with lines that look like "$USER CREATE user.$USER", if you see what I
mean.)

Finally, Cyrus "accounts" are configured differently from ordinary shell
accounts. You can tell Cyrus to authenticate plain logins through PAM,
but then you need your PAM mechanisms to operate as cyrus.mail as well
as root, often not possible. It's possible with Kerberos V, though.
Alternatively, use the sasldb instead. If all your usernames and
passwords are currently stored in /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow, then
you'll be a bit stuck either way. I think there's ways of migrating,
using SASL itself to do the hard work.

The RPMs for RedHat are very good, and downloading the source and
installing from that is fairly easy.

The only gotchas I found with the RPMs are:

1) Initially, no email goes anywhere near Cyrus. You need to setup your
MTA to deliver email via LMTP into Cyrus, ideally. For sendmail, there's
an example config file provided.

2) Sieve, server side filtering scripts - one of the best features of
Cyrus, IMHO - doesn't work out of the box for the RPMs. You'll need to
either use the "sievehomedir yes" setting, or else:

a) mkdir /var/imap/sieve

b) for DIR in `perl -e 'print join( "\n", ( 'a' .. 'z' ) ), "\n";'`; do
mkdir /var/imap/sieve/$DIR; done

c) add "sievedir /var/imap/sieve" to /etc/imapd.conf

d) chown -R cyrus.mail /var/imap/sieve

e) Put "sieve 2000/tcp" into /etc/services

f) service cyrus restart


Then Sieve will work fine. You can use installsieve, which isn't in the
RPM distribution (helpful) or else one of the other Sieve clients that
are out there.


That's probably far more information than you wanted.

FWIW, once setup, I've rarely had to touch a cyrus installation.

Dave.


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