[Dovecot] possible nfs issue

[Patrick Domack]

Maybe it's a cross program issue?

We used to randomly have this happen a long time ago, when using  
postfix and dovecot.

Since switching to using the dovecot lda/lmtp instead of postfix for  
mailbox delievery, I haven't seen this happen at all anymore.

I'm not saying that postfix is at fault for this, but could be a  
timing/race issue between postfix/dovecot accesses to the mailbox.


Quoting Cor Bosman <cor at xs4all.nl>:

> On Oct 3, 2012, at 12:35 AM, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
>
>> On 3.10.2012, at 0.45, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>>
>>> On 3.10.2012, at 0.39, Cor Bosman wrote:
>>>
>>>> With NFS these files are created when a file gets unlinked, but  
>>>> another process still has it open. It disappears as soon as the  
>>>> other process closes it. For some reason they dont disappear. As  
>>>> far as I can tell we've had no server crashes that could explain  
>>>> this.  One possible theory is that a rename happens after an  
>>>> unlink. In that case the file remains. This could possibly be a  
>>>> dovecot issue.
>>>
>>> How can a rename happen after unlink? The rename should fail.  
>>> (Unless doing rename(.nfs1234, something), but Dovecot definitely  
>>> isn't doing that.)
>>
>> You could see if this old test program leaves .nfs files lying around:
>>
>> http://dovecot.org/tmp/readdir.c
>>
>> Just comment out the line:
>>
>> 		close(fd);
>>
>
> I meant the .nfs1234 indeed, but it seemed very unlikely. Thanks for  
> clarifying. The readdir program leaves no .nfs files. We'll have to  
> explore other possibilities.
>
> Cor