Tim Southerwood ts@doc.ic.ac.uk writes:
It's a quite grim, but nonetheless, true reality that some people who may want to run dovecot are stuck in such a situation. Service level aggreements signed by upper tier managers usually don't include "fcntl/F_SETLKW must work". I speak from experience.
For such a situation, another approach would be to split the stuff that needs file locks from the stuff that does not - for instance, leave the largish Maildirs on the NAS or in the SAN, and keep the indexes local and stuff plenty of RAM: it's faster than the network anyways. Dovecot 0.99.10.X allows me to split indexes from Maildirs, I haven't looked if this is a complete solution though.
Yes, I understand - I've seen the code to GNU/tar! (except for the "throwing out" bit - that program is *the* museum of cruft) I totally agree on the desire to keep stuff clean. Finding the balance is usually a matter of debate though.
And other software is spoiled by GNU tar. I've recently seen BSD tar (in FreeBSD -CURRENT) complain about the -o option that automake used to tell it "dereference symlinks"...
Unfortunately, we don't usually have enough time to get to the bottom of every odd fault we get, but this time I'm being more tenacious because this is irritating me (Solaris, not dovecot).
There are several bugs and if the solution is a documentation "install Sun patch 123456 level -07 or higher", it will also work.
The question is whether a pragmatic solution (switch ftpd, move indexes off the SAN as suggested above) or a thorough one is warranted. If the same problem haunts multiple applications, a closer inspection is usually justified.
-- Matthias Andree
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