dovecot - Jul 2004 - dovecot mounts user home dir?

Why does dovecot mount the user home directory
whenever the user checks his email (either pop or
imap)?

Is there a way to disable this?

I have indicated in the default_mail_env
mbox:/home/%u/:INBOX=/mail/%u:INDEX=MEMORY.

The users are in ldap. Windows users' home is in
/home/%u so this is ok but unix users' home are in
their local computers and are mounted (via automount)
at /d1-data/pcname/username.

Even if mounted, the users' home directory isn't used
by dovecot since nothing gets written to it. The users
only checks his pop mail but still, his home directory
gets mounted.

Is it possible that dovecot won't try to mount the
user's home directory whenever the user checks his
mail?

Thanks a lot.

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On 29.7.2004, at 11:38, Peter Evans wrote:
> TM (offmct at yahoo.com) wrote:
>> Why does dovecot mount the user home directory
>> whenever the user checks his email (either pop or imap)?
>
>> Is there a way to disable this?
>
> 	Ask the system nicely, its not dovecot per se,
> 	its the system doing things when dovecot becomes
> 	the user for the duration of the check.
I don't think simply changing user id for process does that. It's more 
likely because of this code in src/master/mail-process.c:

		/* NOTE: if home directory is NFS-mounted, we might not
		   have access to it as root. Change the effective UID
		   temporarily to make it work. */
		if (reply->uid != master_uid && seteuid(reply->uid) < 0)
			i_fatal("seteuid(%s) failed: %m", dec2str(reply->uid));
		ret = chdir(full_home_dir);
		if (reply->uid != master_uid && seteuid(master_uid) < 0)
			i_fatal("seteuid(%s) failed: %m", dec2str(master_uid));

		/* If user's home directory doesn't exist and we're not
		   trying to chroot anywhere, fallback to /tmp as the mails
		   could be stored elsewhere. */

Dovecot just wants to set current directory to user's home directory as 
that's the most logical location. I hadn't thought about any 
automounters.. One way to fix it would be to not use home directories 
in userdb at all, instead set the "mail" setting in it. Then Dovecot 
would chdir to /tmp. Another fix would be to just delete the code above 
and make it always chdir to /tmp. Maybe there should be a setting for 
this? ..
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