dovecot - Dec 2008 - automounting home dirs

Hi,

I'm running dovecot-1.0.10 on a Solaris 10 server with home dirs automounted
over NFS. I have set the mail_location configuration option so that nothing
should be written to a user's home dir over NFS but, as far as I can tell,
dovecot still by default tries to chdir to a user's home dir when reading
mail, although this is not required. This creates additional unnecessary load on
a heavily-loaded fileserver and generally slows everything down and creates an
unnecessary dependency.

Is there a way to prevent dovecot from causing the home dirs to be mounted?

I found this thread:
http://markmail.org/message/umywuppl3vvzfe4p#query:dovecot%20mount%20home%20directory+page:3+mid:fgr4g6pup5y6qbcr+state:results
which discusses the same problem, but it's quite old and there doesn't
seem to be a definitive answer other than hacking the passwd file or the code.

Is there a more elegant solution?

TIA.

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Roger Hale wrote:
> I'm running dovecot-1.0.10 on a Solaris 10 server with home dirs
> automounted over NFS. I have set the mail_location configuration
> option so that nothing should be written to a user's home dir over
> NFS but, as far as I can tell, dovecot still by default tries to
> chdir to a user's home dir when reading mail, although this is not
> required. This creates additional unnecessary load on a
> heavily-loaded fileserver and generally slows everything down and
> creates an unnecessary dependency.
> 
> Is there a way to prevent dovecot from causing the home dirs to be
> mounted?
You can override the home dir returned by your userdb with a 
variable-expanded, "static" value by adding home to args[1].  You need
to be careful and make sure that Dovecot doesn't use anything in the 
users' home dirs.  You may need to set mail_location and/or mail and 
create a virtual home-dir tree local to the Dovecot server.

Posting `dovecot -n` output would help.

1: http://wiki.dovecot.org/UserDatabase