[Dovecot] Stale NFS file handle and duplicated messages

[Adrian Barker]

We recently moved all our users from the Washington IMAP server to
Dovecot. There has been a substantial improvement in performance, but
some users are reporting duplicate messages, and we see 'Stale NFS file
handle' errors in the syslog. Does anyone know what would cause this ?
The errors relate to the index file, eg.

Nov 29 00:49:47 imap-e.ucl.ac.uk dovecot: [ID 107833 mail.error]
IMAP(ccaazzz): close() failed with index
 file /home/ccaazzz/imap-mail/.imap/mbox/dovecot.index: Stale NFS file
handle

Our IMAP servers (5 of them) are a mixture of Sparc Solaris 8 and
Solaris 10 machines, using NFS to a central mailspool running on
AIX. We are using a mixture of Dovecot 1.0.3 and 1.0.5.

dovecot -n gives:

# 1.0.3: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf
base_dir: /var/run/dovecot/
listen: *:143
ssl_listen: *:993
ssl_ca_file: /usr/local/ssl/certs/sureserveredu.pem
ssl_cert_file: /usr/local/ssl/certs/imap-server_ucl_ac_uk.crt
ssl_key_file: /usr/local/ssl/certs/imap.key
ssl_cipher_list: MEDIUM:!LOW
disable_plaintext_auth: no
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot//login
login_executable: /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_user: pp
login_process_per_connection: no
login_processes_count: 30
max_mail_processes: 1500
first_valid_uid: 200
mail_location: mbox:%h/imap-mail:INBOX=/nfs/rcs/mail-spool/mail/%u
mmap_disable: yes
mbox_lock_timeout: 55
mbox_dotlock_change_timeout: 50
mail_drop_priv_before_exec: yes
mail_executable: /usr/local/sbin/dovecot-login.csh
mail_plugins: mbox_snarf
mail_plugin_dir: /usr/local/lib/dovecot
namespace:
  type: private
  separator: /
  inbox: yes
auth default:
  passdb:
    driver: pam
  passdb:
    driver: passwd
  userdb:
    driver: passwd
plugin:
  mbox_snarf: ~/imap-mail/mbox



--

Adrian Barker,
Internet Technology Section
Information Systems
University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
External phone: +44 20 7679 5140,  Fax (+44) 20 7388 5406
Internal phone: x 25140
Email: A.Barker at ucl.ac.uk