dovecot - Jul 2006 - Squirrelmail Change Dovecot Password Plugin

Hi

Let me introduce myself,

My name is Cecil, and i am a system architect by proferssion working
currently on contracts with serveral companies in Ghana and Nigeria.

I recently built a Corporate Mail Server for a Company using Postfix,
Dovecot and Squirrelmail, running on Ubuntu. Thanks to the Dovecot
community everything is working well.

After a moment i noticed that i could make the users change their own
passwords using squirrelmail, but unfortunatly for me after googling
around the Internet and also visiting squirrelmail plugin page i could not
find a change Dovecot password plugin for squirrelmail.

I want to throw this challenge to the Dovecot community to start a project
on developing a change Dovecot password plugin for squirrelmail if none
exis t as at now.

I am ready to voluntee towards the development of the plugin. I will like
to know from others especially the list administrators if the project can
take off on the mailling list with any problems.

Thank You.


Office Of The
SYSTEMS ARCHITECT
DISCOVERYTEL GH

On 7/13/2006 07:42, Cecil S. Nutakor seems to have
typed:
> After a moment i noticed that i could make the users change their own
> passwords using squirrelmail, but unfortunatly for me after googling
> around the Internet and also visiting squirrelmail plugin page i could not
> find a change Dovecot password plugin for squirrelmail.
Having a plugin that allows squirrelmail to change Dovecot's password
would depend entirely on how you have your Dovecot passwords stored.

If your Dovecot passwords are stored as system passwords, then you would
have to allow PHP (squirrelmail) to change system passwords.  Currently,
I have SQL store my Dovecot passwords (which are actually used for
a lot of different authentication purposes), so it was trivial to write
a page that allows users to change the password in the SQL database and
would be easy to add this to squirrelmail if you wanted, but given how
many ways that Dovecot can use for authentication, a generic plugin that
works for all of them would be extraordinarily difficult (and a security
risk for some of the password storage methods - you don't want PHP to
be able to edit your /etc/passwd if you are using *BSD/*nix)

Having a plugin that allows squirrelmail to change Dovecot's password
would depend entirely on how you have your Dovecot passwords stored.

Peter your right,
My Dovecot passwords are stored in /etc/dovecot/passwd
and Dovecot users stored in /etc/dovecot/users

Thanks
> On 7/13/2006 07:42, Cecil S. Nutakor seems to have typed:
>> After a moment i noticed that i could make the users change their own
>> passwords using squirrelmail, but unfortunatly for me after googling
>> around the Internet and also visiting squirrelmail plugin page i could
>> not
>> find a change Dovecot password plugin for squirrelmail.
>
> If your Dovecot passwords are stored as system passwords, then you would
> have to allow PHP (squirrelmail) to change system passwords.  Currently,
> I have SQL store my Dovecot passwords (which are actually used for
> a lot of different authentication purposes), so it was trivial to write
> a page that allows users to change the password in the SQL database and
> would be easy to add this to squirrelmail if you wanted, but given how
> many ways that Dovecot can use for authentication, a generic plugin that
> works for all of them would be extraordinarily difficult (and a security
> risk for some of the password storage methods - you don't want PHP to
> be able to edit your /etc/passwd if you are using *BSD/*nix)
>

Office Of The
SYSTEMS ARCHITECT
DISCOVERYTEL GH