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Postfix Archives: Re: pop-before-smtp revisited

Re: pop-before-smtp revisited

Subject: Re: pop-before-smtp revisited
From: Bennett Todd (betrahul.net)
Date: Wed Jan 05 2000 - 11:09:33 CST

2000-01-04-17:29:24 Wietse Venema:
> One question: how much would it take to have a POP daemon update
> an access DB file upon login, and to have a mine sweeper cron job
> that iterates over the file and that kills old entries every 30
> minutes or so? The disadvantage is that having multiple writers
> requires locking.

What would be the advantage of that approach over my daemon? I enjoy
single-writer on my db file, and use with unmodifed UW pop3d/imapd (and of
course unmodified Postfix). File::Tail backed by a couple of quick regex
matches to toss uninteresting lines doesn't seem to thagomize the CPU, even on
a pretty lively maillog. It can catch up with about 18MB of log (a couple of
days worth) in a dozen seconds or two, and once it's caught up it settles
right down and eats no CPU to speak of at all --- and that's with options
tuned to make it follow the logfile hot-n-fast, so people will see their auth
very shortly after their pop.

> One comment: Postfix maps use file names like `foo' rather than
> `foo.db' for the simple reason that Postfix also needs to support
> DBM databases, which have the nasty property that they come in
> pairs. Suggestions to eliminate the implicit suffix logic are
> welcome.

I don't know whether it's worth bothering with; it sure didn't take long for
me to figure out the problem --- just peeked at maillog after the reload,
which I've come to regard as mandatory whenever I edit main.cf. I've seen the
convention elsewhere, and it fits nicely with the expectation that there might
be a txt file that produces the db file, probably true for most uses of db
files with MTAs.

-Bennett

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