On Mon, March 6, 2006 9:37 am, Nekusagi San wrote: > What are the advantages of each option?
Real User Pros: -Uses existing system accounts for authentication and Home directories for storage -Simplest to setup (basically on a Linux RPM based install, Courier"just works" once the RPMS are installed and Courier is started) -Supports Filesystem permission based shared folders (see maildir/README.sharedfolders.txt from source for further details) Real User Cons: -System accounts must be created for each mail account. Many would consider this a security risk (why should I have to allow a user shell access if all they want is IMAP/SMTP?) -No Virtual Shared Folders (ACLs, etc) support (see maildir/README.sharedfolders.txt from source for further details) -More difficult to maintain accounts when mail services are spread across multiple servers. Virtual User Pros: -Unlimited number of backends to choose from (MySQL, Postgresql, LDAP and userdb come standard, authcustom and authpipe make it easy to use any backend with a little work) -Extremely flexible configuration options. -Allows for single username/password to be used for any other server that can auth to the backend (e.g. LDAP, SQL, etc) -Can scale easily to multiple servers for mail services -Virtual Shared Folders (see maildir/README.sharedfolders.txt from source for further details) Virtual User Cons: -Requires additional configuration, knowledge of backend of choice (need to know basics of SQL or LDAP to maintain them) -Mail services reliability becomes dependent upon reliability of backend system. These are just a few, others may chime in their opinions but in general, I'd say if this is just a home system or you've already given all your users shell access, use system accounts. If you have an existing LDAP or SQL server with usernames/passwords, use virtual accounts. If you have none of these and you're not sure what to go with, try MySQL based auth, it's extremely flexible and powerful without being terribly difficult to configure. Jay -- Jay Lee Network / Systems Administrator Information Technology Dept. Philadelphia Biblical University -- ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Courier-imap mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-imap
