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I upgraded Yosemite 10.10.5 to El-Capitan over the last 2 days, and also disabled SIP. .. and because I do a lot of building of my own things like postfix and dovecot, I didn't notice until today that I no longer have a root user, and where 'root' should appear, it's ownership is now 'dovenull' - a user name related to dovecot. I wonder what happened to 'root' ?

drwxrwxr-x+ 152 dovenull  admin    5168  6 Oct 12:32 Applications
drwxr-xr-x+  64 dovenull  wheel    2176  5 Oct 21:59 Library
drwxr-xr-x@   2 dovenull  wheel      68  5 Oct 21:51 Network
drwxr-xr-x@   3 robert    staff     102  8 Sep 21:18 Read Before You Install iTunes.app
drwxr-xr-x@   4 dovenull  wheel     136  5 Oct 21:45 System
lrwxr-xr-x    1 dovenull  wheel      49 21 Feb  2015 User Information -> /Library/Documentation/User Information.localized
drwxr-xr-x   15 dovenull  admin     510  5 Oct 21:51 Users
drwxrwxrwt@   7 dovenull  admin     238  6 Oct 14:31 Volumes

Everything appears to work fine, including the mailserver and apps. Should I worry about this?

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  • How did you create dove null - and what does ls -ln show
    – mmmmmm
    Oct 6, 2015 at 15:09
  • I fixed the problem. I had inadvertently given the wrong uid/gid to dovecot user. I fixed it by editing the dove* entries. root is now root, and dove* is now dove*
    – Harry McGovern
    Oct 7, 2015 at 13:36

1 Answer 1

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dovenull: Dovecot uses an unprivileged dovenull user for untrusted login processes.

Better check to see if you didn't 'break' some security in Dovecot's config?

Look @ Wiki here: http://wiki.dovecot.org/UserIds

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    I guess you didn't see Fanney Howarth's comment! "I fixed the problem. I had inadvertently given the wrong uid/gid to dovecot user. I fixed it by editing the dove* entries. root is now root, and dove* is now dove*" Under the circumstances you answer wouldn't have fixed the issue anyway.
    – user3439894
    Feb 6, 2017 at 20:28

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