Hi all,
I crawled through the archives for a bit but didn't see anything helpful, so I apologize if this has already been addressed. We've been dying to move from Courier to Dovecot across our whole infrastructure for quite some time, but until recently our setup wasn't possible until this happened:
"Dovecot allows mailboxes and their indexes to be modified by multiple computers at the same time, while still performing well. This means that Dovecot works with NFS and clustered filesystems."
Now that NFS is officially supported, we figured why not make the switch. All of our mail touches NFS in some way, so we need to check on the stability before completely migrating. In test trials we're having issues with the NFS'd index becoming corrupted. Here's the setup:
- Linux workstations running Fedora 8/9 i386 and a locally called Dovecot 1.0.14
- NFS'd homedir with Maildir setup
- NFS is on Solaris 9 sparcv9 (64bit) running Dovecot 1.0.14
Now this setup is just a test example and not exactly what we'll be running in production, but it tipped up the problem either way. Since the index is shared by both the Linux i386 machine and the sparc64 Solaris machine, if mail is accessed from both, lets say with Pine for example, the index becomes corrupted and breaks. As long as only one architecture only ever touches it there are no issues.
I'm assuming this is an endian issue, which would make the most sense. Is there a way around this with flags or server options? Is this something that has maybe been addressed in 1.1.0?
Unfortunately, we are not going to be able to move to Dovecot across all of our systems until this is no longer an issue. We run a lot of mixed environments that have everything from Linux i386/x86_64 to Solaris 9 64 to Windows. If a user accesses IMAP from a Windows box, then logs into the front end which is a Linux x86_64 box and runs Pine, and all of this is on a Solaris sparc NFS system, we're going to have serious issues with the index. ;)
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, -Dave