Dale's Random Ramblings ;-)

Well it happens every now and then that we have to upgrade our hardware to semi keep up with the times. In my case it was upgrading from a 533MHz fanless mini ITX system to a P4 3GHz machine to handle my firewall/gateway/routing/www/proxy/mail etc. Only real major problem I had been with ‘Dovecot‘ not being able to locate mail directories, which was strange as the 2 systems are an almost mirror copy of each other.

Jan 10 22:50:21 system dovecot: pop3(user): Error: user user: Initialization failed: mail_location not set and autodetection failed: Mail storage autodetection failed with home=/home/user
Jan 10 22:50:21 system dovecot: pop3(user): Error: Invalid user settings. Refer to server log for more information.

Turns out cause Dovecot v2 under Debian has gone to a multi conf setup I had to set the mail location in ‘/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf‘

mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

Also the other to check is that the permissions of the mail directories are set to 700 and make the directory if needed:

# mkdir /home/user/mail
# chown user:user mail
# chmod 700 mail

Besides the above error, the rest the upgrade using the config file from the original system was pretty painless beside some clean up to get rid minor warnings in the syslog file. Well this has been my evening, and maybe the above info may help someone else with the same problem.

Oh and the other major thing to remember is to enable IP forwarding and enable the changes to the sysctl.conf

# sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
# sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1
# sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

As it sure does help with stable connectivity for other devices connection to the internets