[Dovecot] NFS random redirects

[Guy]

2009/10/21 Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi>

> On Oct 20, 2009, at 4:47 AM, Thomas Hummel wrote:
>
>  If you do it, you'll most likely see some random index related errors.
>>>
>>
>> But are index related errors recoverable (does dovecot notice and fix it
>> dynamically ?) or will they cause client-side corruption ?
>>
>> How bad would that corruption be ? (like fetching wrong message, since
>> index
>> store nextuid as well ? setting wrong flag ? ...) and how could a client
>> fix it ?
>>
>
> It's unlikely that anything bad happens, but who knows. Random unnoticed
> corruption can do pretty much anything.
>

Our current setup uses two NFS mounts accessed simultaneously by two
servers. Our load balancing tries to keep a user on the same server whenever
possible. Initially we just had roundrobin load balancing which led to index
corruption.
The problems we've had with that corruption have simply been that some
messages are displayed twice or not displayed at all in mail clients.
Deletion of the corrupted index allowed Dovecot to recreate it correctly, so
the client can't do anything about it. You'd probably have to do it manually
or have some sort of web interface for users to do it themselves.

I certainly wouldn't use NFS with multiple servers accessing it again for
Dovecot. Looking at a clustered FS on SAN solution at the moment.

Cheers
Guy

-- 
Don't just do something...sit there!