After thinking about this for a while, I think the best solution is simply to remove the shell check unconditionally. I'm not sure if anyone else except me ever wanted it (and I can live with a couple of unnecessary users getting mailboxes). Done for v2.2: http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-2.2/rev/4eea2224e16b
I did also wonder about using a special "dovecot-skip" GECOS field for this, but maybe not a good idea either. On 1.2.2013, at 0.35, Ben Morrow <b...@morrow.me.uk> wrote: > I am running Dovecot with system users (userdb passwd), but some of > those users don't have shell accounts on the IMAP server so their shell > on that machine is set to /usr/sbin/nologin. Currently I am using > maildirs and this is not a problem, but I am in the process of switching > to dbox which means I will need a cronjob running 'doveadm purge -A'. > > During testing I found that those users with a 'nologin' shell are not > included in the list returned by the userdb iterator, and that the > iterator doesn't honour the first/last_valid_uid settings. This > inconsistency seems undesirable, so the attached patch > > - makes lookup perform the same checks as iteration, > - makes the 'nologin' check configurable, > - adds a new optional check that the user owns their home directory. > > The last check was the one performed by qmail, and seems to me to be a > more reliable 'is this a real user' check than a nologin shell. > > If this patch is applied, the release notes for the next release should > probably mention that system users with a 'nologin' shell will no longer > be allowed to log in to IMAP until the 'auth_check_nologin' setting is > changed from true to false. > > Also, there seem to be two first/last_valid_uid settings: > first_valid_uid itself, which is honoured by the storage subsystem, and > auth_first_valid_uid, which is honoured by the 'passwd' userdb. Is this > intentional? > > Ben > > <userdb-passwd-nologin.patch>