On Sat, 2007-12-08 at 10:21 +0000, Adrian Barker wrote:
We recently moved all our users from the Washington IMAP server to Dovecot. There has been a substantial improvement in performance, but some users are reporting duplicate messages, and we see 'Stale NFS file handle' errors in the syslog. Does anyone know what would cause this ? The errors relate to the index file, eg.
Nov 29 00:49:47 imap-e.ucl.ac.uk dovecot: [ID 107833 mail.error] IMAP(ccaazzz): close() failed with index file /home/ccaazzz/imap-mail/.imap/mbox/dovecot.index: Stale NFS file handle
Our IMAP servers (5 of them) are a mixture of Sparc Solaris 8 and Solaris 10 machines, using NFS to a central mailspool running on AIX. We are using a mixture of Dovecot 1.0.3 and 1.0.5.
Have you read http://wiki.dovecot.org/NFS? v1.0 still has some problems with NFS if you try to access the mailboxes from multiple servers at the same time. I've done a lot of work on v1.1 to get this working right.
I'd suggest either
a) Move index files to local disks
b) Try how v1.1 works with mail_nfs_*=yes settings. I'm going to make the first v1.1 "release candidate" soon, maybe within a few days. Beta10 still has one performance issue unfixed, so might not be a good idea to use that yet. :)