Greetings -
I've got Dovecot 1.0rc24 up and running with both Maildirs and index
files in the same user directory on NFS-mounted filestore. Now I'm
slowly edging things into a better, more efficient and NFS-friendly
setup...
Currently I'm trying to move the index and control files off the NFS- mounted quota'd filestore and onto local disk without quotas.
Q1. We are going to be running multiple load-balanced servers. I know
I can safely put the index files onto locally attached disk and
they
are rebuilt as and when needed.
But is the same true for control files? Or do they need to be
preserved and made available to any server the user may come in
through? (This would imply having to have a different NFS-mounted
filestore, as the NFS-mounted mailstore will have filestore quotas
enabled, and I understand control files can be unhappy in this
environment when the user runs out of quota.)To break up large directories I want to create these in the form /var/dovecot/X/username/control /var/dovecot/X/username/index where X is the first letter of the username. So in dovecot.conf I have:
mail_location = maildir:/mailstore/%1u/%u/Maildir:INDEX=/var/dovecot/% 1u/%u/index:CONTROL=/var/dovecot/%1u/%u/control
Q2. An alternative would be to arrange the index and control diretories
so they both hang off a single per-user area:
/var/dovecot/X/username/control
/var/dovecot/X/username/index
However this again assumes I can safely delete files in the
control
directory tree if they aren't touched for a while. Is this true,
or are they 'valuable' and should be preserved for the lifetime of
the account?
(This is in part Q1 but phrased differently, I guess. :-)I also hit some ownership/protection problems. I'd originally
assumed that I just had to create the top level
/var/dovecot/{control,index}
directories and these could be owned root:root with mode 755. But
Dovecot fails to create these and logs entries such as:
dovecot: Mar 07 12:00:47 Error: IMAP(pmb1)[2835]:
mkdir(/var/dovecot/index/p/pmb1/.INBOX) failed: Permission denied
Experimentation suggests that the instance of Dovecot wanting to
create the directories is running under the user's uid/gid (me, in
this case). Hence I now believe:
I need to manually pre-create the next level down directories /var/dovecot/{control,index}/[a-z]
Set these to be owned root:root with mode rwxrwxrwt
I can periodically clean out 'old' files in the index tree. (Not sure about the control tree: hence Q1 and Q2 above.)
This seems to work OK... I just wanted to check I hadn't missed
something simpler and blindingly obvious?
Cheers, Mike B-)
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