Dovecot on The Gnu Pit

Upgrading to Debian 13 Trixie

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 07:12:15 -0500

Ah, the trials and tribulations of upgrading Debian 12 Bookworm to Debian 13 Trixie! I learned a valuable lesson this weekend with the update - always read the apt listchanges email. Always.

The upgrade itself went smoothly with no errors during the packages upgrading/installing. I run three main services on my server - nginx, exim, and dovecot. On reboot, all three had issues with the upgraded packages.

nginx

I received the following error in my nginx error.log:

Let's Encypt SSL Certificates with Exim, Dovecot & NGINX

Fri, 19 May 2017 14:32:24 -0500

I ran into two issues when setting up Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates on two of my servers - permission issues for Exim and the certbot cron job supplied by the package doesn’t handle the renew very well for nginx, exim or dovecot.

Resolving Exim’s Permission Problems

1. Create a new group. I named it sslcerts. Add the exim user to that group. If you’re not using Debian, adjust the user in the command below.