[Dovecot] Help! Uidlist files are gone and won't come back; imap keeps coredumping!

[Mario Nigrovic]

Timo -

   The problem manifested more-or-less as I upgraded from 0.99 to 1.0; but we also replaced the NFS server (formerly a Sun) with the netapp around the same time.  The netapp has snapshots turned on, so it's doing something unusual to preserve files.

					Mario
Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 10:59 -0700, Mario Nigrovic-rvvk40 wrote:
>> Here's another NFS weirdness detail:
>>
>> I've got just a ton of .nfs files all over my .mail subdirectory.  I think these are the byproduct of our NFS server's keeping snapshot files around, but I'm not sure.  Typical content is like:
> 
> Those are created when a file is deleted from the filesystem but it's
> still opened by the process itself. It should be deleted automatically
> when the process dies. All of this is done by the kernel.
> 
>> Also, I've now seen two messages like the following.  Are these usual?
>>
>> dovecot: Jun 19 09:13:27 Error: IMAP(rvvk40): Maildir /home/mario/.mail/Maildir/.Freescale.ATIC.CMOS65 sync: UIDVALIDITY changed (1150719396 -> 1150728477)
> 
> These mean that dovecot-uidlist file was temporarily lost and then
> created by another Dovecot process, while the first process still had
> the mailbox open.
> 
> Since you're using Solaris 8 it seems a bit weird that it would behave
> this badly with NFS, since Solaris was the one OS where it was supposed
> to work properly.. But the Dovecot's broken behavior is anyway because
> of your NFS's broken behavior. I don't think you can get it working
> properly. If it was working correctly before, did you change something
> like update the kernel?