[Dovecot] nfs locking issues...

[John Gray]

I'm running Dovecot 1.1 RC1.  I believe I've done all the due diligence 
for making things working correctly over nfs.  But I run into locking 
issues if I run over nfs. 

procmail is doing the delivery over nfs.  uw-imap was ruining over nfs.
dovecot is fine if its on the nfs server (i.e. it has local access to 
the disk, no nfs)
I run into lock deadlocks if I run dovecot over nfs
Users are directed to different servers, but a given users will always 
get the same server (at least until there's no activity for that user 
for over an hour).  This only applies to when running dovecot over nfs.  
Everybody goes to the nfs server otherwise.

Sometimes I can kill all the processes, remove the dot locks, and 
recover.  Something I need to reboot the nfs server to recover.

Let me give a run down of the particulars:

All the mail is in mbox format.
everybody runs linux with kernel 2.6.24.2 (any known nfs locking issues 
there?).
delivery is done via procmail, its locking and dovecot's are both 
dotlock, fcntl.
The nfs mount options are 
actimeo=3,hard,noatime,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,nfsvers=3
The clocks are in sync.

Dovecot.conf:
protocols = imap imaps pop3 pop3s
login_greeting = imap ready.
mail_location = mbox:~/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
mmap_disable = yes
mail_nfs_storage = yes
mail_nfs_index = yes
protocol imap {
}
protocol pop3 {
  pop3_uidl_format = %08Xu%08Xv
}
auth default {
  mechanisms = plain
  passdb pam {
  }
  userdb passwd {
  }
  user = root
}
dict {
}
plugin {
}

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
John

-- 
John Gray                           gray at agora-net.com
AgoraNet, Inc.                      (302) 224-2475
314 E. Main Street, Suite 1         (302) 224-2552 (fax)
Newark, De 19711                    http://www.agora-net.com