Dovevot Authetication

[Rainer Müller]

Cameron Simpson wrote:
> | And this with a plain text authentication used for testing:
> | 
> | - -----------------------------
> |    # passwd-like file with specified location
> |    # <doc/wiki/AuthDatabase.PasswdFile.txt>
> |    passdb passwd-file {
> |      # Path for passwd-file
> |      args = /opt/local/etc/dovecot/passwd.dovecot
> |    }
> | - -----------------------------
> | 
> | Maybe someone spend to much time: it there a best practice for  
> | authentication on MacOS.

There is the configuration option disable_plaintext_auth to disallow 
authentification over plain text. Make sure it is set to no if you want 
plain text auth.

Make sure the user dovecot is running at has read access to that file. 
You can also enable auth_verbose and auth_debug in the config to get 
some more logging.

> Hmm.
> 
> 1: Are you in the passwd.dovecot file?
> 2: Dovecot has a lower limit on the uids it will make available.
>    What is your uid? Is it below 1000? The limit is tunable, but when I ran
>    into this a few years ago I seized the opportunity to obtain uid 11111
>    instead:-)

User accounts on Mac OS X start at 500 as far as I know. If this is a 
common problem, maybe the default config file should be patched to 
reflect this?

> 3: MacOSX accounts aren't all in /etc/passwd. I expect that's all neatly
>    hidden by the getpwnam() function or nothing would work, but maybe
>    there is something Mac specific happening. Check out (1) and (2) above
>    first though.

User accounts are handled by the Directory Service. See 'man 8 
DirectoryService' for more information.

Rainer