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We were messing w/ Postfix and Cyrus IMAPD today. Our prime goal was making a sensical approach to authenticating against a PostgreSQL-based directory. LDAP (OpenLDAP and FDS) based tools sucks for most people. Using native-box-auth is actually quite messy. The mail data cannot be easily associated with the users. You end up with data spread everywhere.

Our basic tenants are:

• Simple Database Schema - there is no need for a highly relational approach for something so simple.
• Embedded procedures where possible.
• Simple front-end.

My esteemed colleague John implemented our thoughts. He ended up with a few PGSQL functions, a couple views and a very straight-forward process.

The actual setup for IMAPD and Postfix is nearly as simple. He will be documenting it at his site later. For now, we wanted to verify the actual behaviour of postfix and imapd during SASL auth in realtime. We turned to inotify. I install pyinotify, and used thier Quick Start script. This ended up leaving me a simple script which monitored the directories which I wanted.

This will not show you files which failed to open. But it does good enough.

import os
from pyinotify import WatchManager, Notifier, ThreadedNotifier, EventsCodes, ProcessEvent


wm = WatchManager()

mask = EventsCodes.INDELETE | EventsCodes.INACCESS | EventsCodes.INOPEN | EventsCodes.INCREATE  # watched events

class PTmp(ProcessEvent):

def process_IN_CREATE(self, event):
    print "Create: %s" %  os.path.join(event.path, event.name)

def process_IN_DELETE(self, event):
    print "Remove: %s" %  os.path.join(event.path, event.name)

def process_IN_ACCESS(self, event):
    print "Access: %s" % os.path.join(event.path, event.name)

def process_IN_OPEN(self,event):
    print "Open: %s" % os.path.join(event.path, event.name)


notifier = Notifier(wm, PTmp())
wdd = wm.addwatch('/etc', mask, rec=True)
wdd = wm.addwatch('/usr/lib/sasl2', mask, rec=True)

while True:  # loop forever

try:
    # process the queue of events as explained above
    notifier.process_events()
    if notifier.check_events():
        # read notified events and enqeue them
        notifier.read_events()
    # you can do some tasks here...
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    # destroy the inotify's instance on this interrupt (stop monitoring)
    notifier.stop()
    break