Configuring nginx as mail proxy

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 05:38:29PM -0400, Laurent Bonetto wrote:

> I did understand you meant to change the number of 
> worker_connections. The only reason why I had lowered it was 
> that I got a warning:
> nginx: [warn] 1024 worker_connections exceed open file resource limit: 256

This indicate that you have very low open file resource limit set.  
Easiest way to fix this is to use worker_limit_nofile nginx 
configuration directive, see here:

http://nginx.org/r/worker_limit_nofile

Of course tuning your OS and/or using ulimit will do the trick as 
well.  Using worker_connections set to something like 128 will 
help as well, but it's just to low for any real work and may be 
only used for testing.

> After pointing my mail client to localhost, I was finally able 
> to see nginx hit my mock for an authentication request so there 
> is definitely some progress! Unfortunately, the proxying is 
> still not working. More precisely:
> 
> nginx hits my authenticate mock server with:
> Host: localhost
> Auth-User: <my user name>
> Auth-Pass: <my password>
> Auth-Protocol: pop3
> Auth-Login-Attempt: 1
> Client-IP: 192.168.1.104
> - If my mock responds with
> < HTTP/1.1 200 OK
> < Content-Type: text/html
> < Auth-Status: Invalid login or password
> < Auth-Wait: 3
> < Content-Length: 0
> Then my mail client tells me that I have the incorrect username or password, as expected.
> 
> - However, if my mock responds with:
> < Auth-Status: OK
> < Auth-Server: <my mail server>
> < Auth-Port: 110
> The the mail client responds with an internal server error.
> I added the Auth-Pass (which should not be needed anyway) in the 
> response and that didn't help.

Do you return response without http response line, i.e. 
"HTTP/1.1 200 OK"?

What's exactly in the Auth-Server header returned?  Note that this 
must be an IP address, not a hostname.

> Since I didn't see any error in the error.log from nginx I used 
> wireshark to monitor traffic. I filtered on tcp.port eq 110 and 
> compared side by side the traffic coming from an account using a 
> direct connection to my mail server, and an account going 
> through the nginx proxy. In the second case (through proxy), I 
> do not see any traffic going out to my mail server, suggesting 
> it does not get the info it was expecting from my authentication 
> service.
> 
> - Can you think of something I am missing?
> - How do I even go about debugging what's happening here apart 
> from what I am already doing (using wireshark)?

Appropriate errors should be logged by nginx into error log.  I 
would suggests there should be something like

2012/10/25 02:29:10 [error] 64793#0: *1 auth http server 127.0.0.1:8081 sent invalid server address:"foobar" while in http auth state ...

this time.  It's strange you don't see anything.

Detailed debug information may be obtained using debug log, see 
http://nginx.org/en/docs/debugging_log.html.

[...]

>   mail {      
>   # I assume server_name comes from Auth-Server so I tried commenting out. Same behavior.
>     server_name       <my mail server>; 

Just a side note: server_name is needed mostly to present 
something to a client when it connects, see here:

http://nginx.org/en/docs/mail/ngx_mail_core_module.html#server_name

It can't be from Auth-Server as it's only available later, after 
auth http service request.  It should be safe to omit it though, 
machine hostname will be used by default.

[...]

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.com/support.html