UW-IMAPD woes and LOTS of related questions about xinetd

[Igor Pechtchanski]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, overbored wrote:

> I had posted this earlier as a sub-question, but I guess not a lot of
> people saw it....

I don't know much about xinetd and imapd beyond the general basics, but
let me take a shot at answering.  See below.

> [snip]
>
> Aside #1: how does this know what port to work with? I know what the default
> imap port is (143), but how does xinetd know?

See <http://google.com/search?q=man+%2Fetc%2Fservices>, or "man 4
services" on your favorite Linux machine.

> Aside #2: there are a lot of other services under xinetd.d. Does that
> mean these are all currently enabled? For instance, ftpd is there...so
> someone could be FTPing into my box right now? (In fact, just now I ran
> 'nc localhost 21' and it works...gulp...!)

Apparently yes.

> Aside #3: if ssh were also under xinetd.d (it's not currently), wouldn't that
> conflict with the ssh service that I already set up as a Service (as
> instructed at http://tech.erdelynet.com/cygwin-sshd.html)?

Yes, it would, if both xinetd and sshd services were started at the same
time.  The one started later will not be able to bind to the sshd port.

> Back to main question: I managed to get init and xinetd working (at least I
> can see their processes in taskmgr). However, when I try to connect to
> localhost (no SSL) using Thunderbird, it says that the connection was refused,
> without giving me a chance to login. I also tried 'nc localhost 143', but got
> a connection refused (basically the same thing I see as running 'nc localhost
> <random number>'). I've done a ton of searching to get where I am, but now I'm
> at a dead end. Any ideas?

Did you add imapd to /etc/services?

> Does this have anything to do with the old "add 'Everyone' to passwd"
> hack? (A more recent post warned us NOT to add this to passwd.)

Doubtful.

> Another thing...how easy is it to configure UW-IMAP? From what I've
> read, it seems that *everything* is configured in the source or Makefile
> (no conf files, etc.). /usr/share/doc/Cygwin/uw-imap-2002e.README says
> the author modified it from what's on
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/uw-imap-cygwin/, so what exactly should
> I be modifying? The canonical homepage just points to the original
> UW-IMAP site. I looked for but didn't find any personal website of
> Abraham Backus.

Isn't there a UW-IMAP mailing list?  The above question doesn't seem to
have anything to do with Cygwin.

> (What I'm ultimately trying to do is have all my downloaded (via POP)
> mail stored on my computer and accessible via IMAP, so that I can access
> it using a variety of mail clients - GUI (Thunderbird), CLI (mutt), and
> HTTP (don't know what to try).)

That's the usual reason for using an IMAP server.  This doesn't make the
above question any more Cygwin-related.

> Please let me know if any further info is needed (I've included cygcheck
> -srv below). Thanks in advance!

HTH,
	Igor
P.S. It's usually a bad idea to have spaces in your Cygwin username.
-- 
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