Dovecot Active:failed because of ssl_cert: can't open file /etc/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem: Permission denied. Why?

Question

Hello I try to follow this Postfix/Dovecot tutorial series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njiNRppQNJw&list=PLibQjquhfgjjosRrZxlDepXfehDXuQJu_&index=5

When I run dovecot:

sudo service dovecot restart
sudo service dovecot status

I get: Active: failed

Unlike postfix who is active normally.

I tried: dovecot -F to see what has failed. (suggested in: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8319151/how-to-start-dovecot)

And it said:

doveconf: Fatal: Error in configuration file /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf
line 12: ssl_cert: can't open file /etc/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem: Permission denied

I tried to look at the permissions on this file:

sudo ls -l /etc/dovecot/private/dovecot/pem

And got:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 nov. 21 14:04 /etc/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem -> /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem

I tried to change those permissions:

sudo chmod -R 700 /etc/dovecot/private/

But it hasn't worked out.

I tried to check if I missed a curly braces while making changes in configurations files. And so far I haven't found anything wrong.

Any ideas why it's not working?

Thanks for you help!

Answer 1

as per the information you've provided above /etc/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem is a symbolic link to the file at /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem . If you don´t have a certificate file in that path it will fail.

To do so:

sudo apt-get install ssl-cert
sudo make-ssl-cert generate-default-snakeoil
sudo usermod --append --groups ssl-cert yyuu
ls -l /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem

as mentioned here: https://gist.github.com/yyuu/4335041