[Dovecot] Unbreakable NFS locking issues...

[Rod Treweek]

Thank you very much for your reply, Noel,


>Firstly, posting the same message with a slightly modified subject wont
get you any answers any sooner, please refrain from doing this, it only
gives you a bad name and may have the opposite affect to one you desire.


Yeah, typical rookie move by posting twice...didn't see my post, so went
into the dovecot list setting for my account to adjust it to get a
confirmation, and then sent the message again.  Really stupid, and I
apologize.

>Generally when lodging requests for help, it pays to use the latest
version of software, 1.1.2 is old.

Definitely will be doing this, but just wanted to get some information on
the locking issue first.

>mbox over NFS ? That is asking for trouble, mbox is *not* NFS safe, you
are best changing to maildir which is.

Yeah, this is definitely wrong.  Everything is in maildir format on the
mailstore. Question is, why would this even be working at all if it's wrong
in the config? The sql connection string has maildir defined in it, so, I'm
wondering if that might explain it.  Also, the indexes are not local which I
believe has been the recommendation. Also Lockd appears to be enabled on
both sides.

-Rod


Firstly, posting the same message with a slightly modified subject wont
get you any answers any sooner, please refrain from doing this, it only
gives you a bad name and may have the opposite affect to one you desire.



On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 4:13 AM, Noel Butler <noel.butler at ausics.net> wrote:

> Firstly, posting the same message with a slightly modified subject wont
> get you any answers any sooner, please refrain from doing this, it only
> gives you a bad name and may have the opposite affect to one you desire.
>
> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 10:06, Rod Treweek wrote:
>
> > Hello All,
> >
> >     We are struggling to find a solution to a problem we are encountering
> > with a load-balanced email setup. Currently, we have a Coyote
> loadbalancer,
> > and 3 Postfix/Dovecot nodes that then get their information from a mysql
> > database.  The problem is that after a couple weeks, we start seeing NFS
> > locking issues occur, which then takes email completely down, requiring a
> > site visit to basically do an interactive mode reboot to shut off NFS so
> > that we can remount the filesystem again.  We have our mailstore on an
> > Aberdeen NAS which is accessed over NFS v. 4.
> >
>
> Not seen this before, but we use Foundry LB's and NetApp filers.
> Coyote Is BSD based isn't it... How is your setup, you are not running
> the NFS mounts through the LB as well are you? I would hope they are on
> a separate private LAN
>
>
> >  Dovecot version 1.1.2
>
>
>
> Generally when lodging requests for help, it pays to use the latest
> version of software, 1.1.2 is old.
>
>
>
> > Here's the relevant mysql string:
>
>
> If the queries work at all, there's nothing wrong with them.
>
>
> > mbox:/NFS1MAILDIR/mailSysV2/%d/%u:INDEX=/usr/local/mail/indexes/%d/%1n/%n
>
>
> mbox over NFS ? That is asking for trouble, mbox is *not* NFS safe, you
> are best changing to maildir which is.
>
>
>
> Cheers
>


Thank you very much for your reply, Noel,




Yeah, typical rookie move by posting twice...didn't see my post, so went
into the dovecot list setting for my account to adjust it to get a
confirmation, and then sent the message again.  Really stupid, and I
apologize.