[Dovecot] Dovecot index, NFS, and multiple architectures

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 12:00 -0400, David Halik wrote:
> I just reproduced the environment and the index corrupted immediately 
> across NFS because of the endian issue.
> 
> Jun 25 11:53:34 host IMAP(user): : Rebuilding index file 
> /dovecot-index/index/user/.INBOX/dovecot.index: CPU architecture changed
> Jun 25 11:53:35 host IMAP(user): : Corrupted index cache file 
> /dovecot-index/index/user/.INBOX/dovecot.index.cache: field header 
> points outside file

I'll check later if I can reproduce this.

> This was starting from a clean index, first opening pine on the NFS 
> Solaris 9 sparc machine, and then at the same time opening pine on my 
> Fedora 9 i386 workstation.

Why does it matter where you run Pine? Does it directly execute Dovecot
on the local machine instead of connecting via TCP?

> I'm going to try the idea of splitting the indexes into two different 
> architectures, but I'm worried that this will not be feasible when we 
> try to scale to our 80,000 users.

I'd suggest not running Dovecot on different architectures. Like if
you're on a non-x86 make it connect via TCP to a x86 Dovecot server.

> By the way, I don't think this is related to the corruption, but we also 
> have tons of these in the logs:
> 
> Jun 25 11:52:32 host IMAP(user): : Created dotlock file's timestamp is 
> different than current time (1214409234 vs 1214409152): 
> /dovecot-index/control/user/.INBOX/dovecot-uidlist
> Jun 25 11:52:32 host IMAP(user): : Created dotlock file's timestamp is 
> different than current time (1214409235 vs 1214409152): 
> /dovecot-index/control/user/.INBOX/dovecot-uidlist

Dovecot really wants that clocks are synchronized between the NFS
clients and the server. If the clock difference is more than 1 second,
you'll get problems.
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