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Re: Cyrus debianized?



* Toens Bueker said:
> Marek Habersack <grendel@vip.net.pl> wrote:
> 
> > > This is Cyrus 1.5.x BTW, not 1.6 (1.6 needs the SASL stuff which
> > > seems to be very broken in places). Sadly 1.5.x doesn't support
> > > PAM (but 1.6 does and when it's stable, I'll package it).
> > SASL is a PITA - the pwcheck stuff doesn't work without much tweaking, I
> > didn't even got PAM to work - it refuses to authenticate when cyrus runs
> > with the 'cyrus' user's ID, and cyrus refuses to run as root. The sasldb
> > auth doesn't work as well.
> 
> Could you elaborate on this? 
Of course. I have set up a virtual server in a chrooted tree. The server is
supposed to host accounts which can be accessed only from specific places
and only using IMAP. Now, I tried to setup cyrus + SASL to use the
PAM authentication but alas, PAM only refuses to authenticate the logged in
user, because of "authentication failure; (uid=999) -> someuser for imap
service". At first I thought the problem lies somewhere in a way which the
chrooted PAM libraries look for the user's authentication data, but other
PAMified services, like POP3 server, work flawlessly - as long as they run
initially as root. When cyrus is configured (by setting the SUID bit) to run
as root, it refuses to start because "cyrus cannot run as root" - which is a
good security measure unless it prevents the daemon from working... Now, I
don't know what to lay the blame on - is it Cyrus or is it PAM that needs
fixing? Either way, I decided to drop PAM and started to test other
authentication possibilities using SASL - sasldb (didn't work - despite the
existence of the sasldb database file the library refused to authenticate
the user), then pwcheck daemon (it didn't compile at all - seems the source
is unmaintained. I had to edit the sources of both Makefiles and the program
itself to make it compile and link. Nevertheless, the effort was futile -
the pwcheck-based authentication also doesn't work). 
I decided to give up and look at some other imapd server - namely Courier
which compiles without problems, and seems to run ok (testing it right now)
- not to mention it's GPL-ed.
Ah, another note about imapd servers - the UW imapd refused to run in a
chroot jail as well...
 
> We run Cyrus 1.6.13 with sasl-5.1.0, libpam-0.69 and
My versions are, respectively, 1.6.19, 1.5.11, 0.71

> shadow-password. The only problem seems to be 'feedcyrus',
> which we cannot get to cooperate. Everything else works
> fine. Actually we didn't have to tweak anything.
I can get cyrus as far as it comes to authentication... Which is not very
useful...
 
> This is on a potato-machine.
As well

marek

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