Cyrus IMAP Presentation

[adam at morrison-ind.com]

>>I've created a presentation about Cyrus IMAPd that I will be showing to
>>the
>>local LUG in a couple of weeks.  I'd appreciate it if some Cyrus masters
>>would> take a look at it and see if I've gotten anything wrong.
>Some of these may be a bit picky, but they're things I noticed.
>(Slide 5)
>I beleive there are Debian Packages, put together by Henrique de Moraes
>Holschuh <hmh at debian.org>.

Now mentioned.

>(Slide 6)
>"prefork" keeps *atleast* that number of processes standing by.  Processes
>will be reused as they become available (and they expire after they've
>been waiting around for a while doing nothing)

Ok, I clarified that.

>(Slide 8)
>The mailbox hierarchy does not have to work the way you describe (see also
>altnamespace and unixhierarchysep)

Noted,  but I don't know if I want to go into that.

Do "typical" installations use altnamespace or the hierarchical name space?

If I change it after the server is in use does it wig out user subscriptions,
etc...?

>(Slide 11)
>Technically, you can have administrative accounts other than
>"cyrus".  And you can change the access right required to delete folders
>with the deleteright flag.

True,  but again a little deeper than I want to go.  It has to fit in 45 minutes. :)

>(Slide 12)
>Your information regarding postuser is wrong.  You specify postuser to
>be "boards" but then send a message to "bb+service".  Even then, the
>example you give (bb+service) delivers to the mailbox "service" and not
>boards.service.

Ok,  I have to admit I'm snowed by the bulletin board thing.  All I get is -

Sep 16 19:48:03 sardine sendmail[16698]: g8GNm2j16696: to=<bb+shared.Departments
                                .CIS at morrison-ind.com>, delay=00:00:01,
xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=cyrusbb, pri=306                                 25,
dsn=5.6.0, stat=Data format error
Sep 16 19:48:03 sardine sendmail[16698]: g8GNm2j16696: g8GNm3j16698: DSN: Data f
                                ormat error

I think I'm missing something fundamental, and not just me.  There are quite a
few posts about this I've found via google, but no resolutions.

>(Slide 15)
>- I think you mean "Cyrus IMAP uses Cyrus SASL version 2 to proces all
>authentication"

Right, fixed.

> - Your catagorization of Kerberos IV as a plaintext mechanism is
> confusing.  Yes, you can verify plaintext Kerberos IV passwords.  You can
> also verify Kerberos V passwords.  Of course, you should avoid doing this
> as much as possible and just use the KERBEROS_IV and GSSAPI SASL
> mechanisms if you can.

Right, that was a straight up type, fixed.

> - Along the same lines, "GSSAPI" is more correct than Kerberos V.

Right.

> - SASLdb is not the only way of storing shared secrets, and there are
> other mechanisms that can use them (SRP, OTP)

Right,  but seems more fitting for a presentation on SASL itself.

>(Slide 16)
>- "-n 5" is probably low for a reasonably high traffic site.

I've got about 200 users,  if there should be more threads will authentication
fail or just be really slow?

>(Slide 29)
>- Managing IMAP is well out of date, and probably is more confusing than
>helpful.

I'm starting to think your right.