[Dovecot] deliver and stale NFS file handles

[Timo Sirainen]

On Fri, 2009-10-16 at 14:25 +0200, Leon Meßner wrote:
> Oct 16 00:10:42 mail3 dovecot: deliver(user):
> write_full(/home/r/user/.temp.backupmail.22774.d17050a07b2108e8)
> failed: Stale NFS file handle
> 
> It nearly never happens with text/plain mails but _very_
> often when mails have attachments of some different type. This is inside
> a 7.2-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD jail. The NFS export is mounted from the
> machine that is running the jail. Locking with lockf works.

It happens with mails that are larger than 128 kB. Then Dovecot creates
a .temp.* file and unlink()s it and tries to keep using it as a
temporary file. I thought this would have worked with all NFS clients,
since at least Linux then renames the file to .nfs.* file and deletes it
automatically..

Can you try what happens if you do in your FreeBSD on NFS system:

touch foo
tail -f foo&
rm -f foo
fg

Does it complain about stale NFS handle?

The reason this wasn't happening with older versions was because deliver
did this in /tmp instead of in user's home.
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