[Pkg-giraffe-discuss] alioth repo updated

[Mark Dufour]

hi matthias,

> We changed the default configs of most daemons, so that they drop their
> privileges when started. I experienced problems doing that with the
> zarafa-search service though, but have not looked into it in detail yet.

yeah, search unfortunately works slightly different from the other services, as it is the only one at this point written in python  (using python-zarafa, python-daemon, python-lockfile). the other services do their thing as 'root' in /var/run, before switching to the specified user. search does not (yet) do that, which sounded logical at the time.. ;-)

we are considering moving to an approach where all services do their thing inside a subdirectory of /var/run, say /var/run/zarafa/.. this almost made it into 7.2.1 in fact. but it should currently work fine with the correct permissions. the following options in search.cfg which are important in this regard:

-index_path (where does it store the xapian databases)
-pid_file (note that the pid_file is also hardcoded in the init script.. :S)
-server_bind_name (unix socket that Zarafa uses to talk to search)
-log_file (clearly; btw you probably want to set log_level to 6 while testing)

it's probably easiest to test this by running '/usr/sbin/zarafa-search -F' as user 'zarafa' (for example by using paths in search.cfg starting with /home/zarafa everywhere at first). then when everything works switch to running as root with without the -F.

since we are moving to a subdirectory of /var/run, and assuming this is good practice under debian as well, perhaps you guys would like to make this move as well?

cheers,
mark.