[Dovecot] Re: Bug? 1.0.0-test28 NFS locking problems

[Tim Southerwood]

Hi Matthias

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 15:46:59 +0200
Matthias Andree <matthias.andree at gmx.de> wrote:

> Tim Southerwood <ts at doc.ic.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> > Now that's very interesting. I shall examine this in more detail.
> > All our Solaris servers have the same setup and I didn't do it - so
> > my initial thought was "Solaris must be weird"!
> 
> > Do you have anything different in your 2.8 solaris server?
> 
> Good question. Not that I know of - for the test was conducted in a
> LAN that isn't mine, I've masked the IP addresses and hostnames:
> 
> Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.8       Generic February 2000
> bash-2.05$ cat /etc/dfs/dfstab
> [...comments snipped...]
> share -F nfs -o rw=@XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/26 /space
> share -F nfs -o ro=@XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX/26 /opt
> 
> bash-2.05$ uname -a
> SunOS somehost 5.8 Generic_117350-04 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10

Well ours are behind on some patches:

SunOS buzzard.doc.ic.ac.uk 5.8 Generic_108528-27 sun4u sparc
SUNW,Sun-Fire-280R

> Are your nlockmgrs running? All relevant patches installed?  The
> machines I tested on have been fully patched up two days before the
> test-- "pgrep lockd" and "rpcinfo -p" on client and server should tell
> you.

Yes, they are all happy.

> At any rate, I don't think Solaris fcntl-style file locking is broken.

I beg to differ - at least it looks like there *was* a bug which may
have been cleared by a patch that you have that we don't. I'll pass this
to our Solaris admin. Also, I have turned up quite a lot of problems
with F_SETLKW on the samba lists - seems to be a common problem with
Solaris servers. I'll have a look on the Sun lists and see if there is a
patch specifically for this.

Anyrate, one of two conclusions:

1) It's not dovecot's fault, which is fair, and this bug should be
dropped as not a bug.

2) It's not really a bug with dovecot, but if F_SETLKW fails, dovecot
should fall back to something involving F_SETLK.

I prefer number 2) as a user as it's clear to me that there is some
brokenness on NFS servers in the world and it would be to the greater
good if dovecot were more forgiving.

Cheers

Tim

-- 
Tim J Southerwood
Senior Programmer