Month: June 2018

Getting Dovecot running on a new server.

I followed these Dovecot installation instructions and everything appeared to work, but I couldn’t get mail. I went into my mail client and retyped the password. I got an error message when it tried to verify the server saying that I had an invalid certificate.

I tried getting a standalone certificate using certbot, but my attempt failed. It turns out that you need to stop apache before running certbot with the standalone command. Then run:


sudo certbot certonly --standalone --preferred-challenges http -d mail.mymaildomain.com <code>

This puts a new certificate just for mail in the /etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.mymaildomain.com directory. You need to tell Dovecot where to find the certificate by editing the SSL file.

Look for these lines near the top of the file.


#ssl_cert = </etc/dovecot/dovecot.pem
#ssl_key = </etc/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem

Configure Dovecot

Dovecot’s SSL configuration is done in an auxiliary file located at /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf. In here you’ll find two parameters that need to be changed: ssl_cert and ssl_key. Like postfix, dovecot will need the full certificate chain to present to clients for validation.

Edit the configuration file to point to the new certificates. Be sure to include the leading < before the file path, this is what tells dovecot to read from a file rather than use the value literally. 


ssl_cert = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.example.com/fullchain.pem
ssl_key = </etc/letsencrypt/live/mail.example.com/privkey.pem

The only other issue I had was with the mail_location. I must have picked mbox format when the messages are in Maildir format. I changed this line in 10-mail.conf.


mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

Notes on testing domains while migrating to a new server.

When moving sites to a new server, you can test each one by replacing the DocumentRoot in the 000-default.conf file with the directory containing each site. You might want to do some site tweaking and changing the location for each site can get tedious after a while. The solution is to set up Apache to test virtual servers without domain names. The first step is to edit the /etc/hosts file on the computer that you will be using to visit the sites. Add the sites you wish to test and the IP address at the end of the file.


142.255.228.33 firstsitetotest.com
142.255.228.33 secondsitetotest.com
...
142.255.228.33 lastsitetotest.com

You don’t need to reboot your computer or reload the file to get it to work.

Next, edit the 000-default.conf file in /etc/apache2/sites-available/
I keep my site files in the /www directory.


 <VirtualHost firstsitetotest.com:80>
    ServerName www. firstsitetotest.com
    DocumentRoot /www/firstsitetotest

 </VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost secondsitetotest.com:80>
    ServerName www.secondsitetotest.com
    DocumentRoot /www/secondsitetotest

 </VirtualHost>
...
 <VirtualHost lastsitetotest.com:80>
    ServerName www. lastsitetotest.com
    DocumentRoot /www/lastsitetotest

 </VirtualHost>

Reload Apache with sudo systemctl reload apache2 and test your config with sudo systemctl status apache2

If the sites currently exist, you should make a small change in the main file to make sure you are being redirected to the new site.