[Dovecot] Deleting NFS-mounted Maildir subfolders fails

[Christian Ehrhardt]

Hi,

[ please CC me on replies, I'm not subscribed to the list ]

I'm using dovecot-99.9.1 with a little hack to get authentication to
work the way we want it. The server is running on a Solaris 9 host
and user homes are mounted via NFS from a Solaris 8 server (Version doesn't
seem to matter).

Almost everything's fine but I can't delete maildir subfolders if these
reside on a non local NFS-directory. The reason given is that the directory
isn't empty and hence can't be deleted.

Most likely the following happens: dovecot has the index file and
other stuff in the maildir subfolder opened via NFS. When the delete request
comes in dovecot deletes these files but doesn't close them. On normal
unix file systems this is no Problem but with Solaris NFS these file's aren't
actually deleted until they are (explicitly or implicitly) closed.
Instead they are renamed to .nfs.<some digits>. These files will automatically
vanish once they are closed. However, as long as they exist it is impossible
to delete the directory where these files reside and rmdir fails.

This is not a big deal and one may argue that dovecot is fine and the
NFS implementation is in error. However, it would be cool if dovecot
could atttempt to close all administrative files before it deletes them
(or at least before it tries to delete the directory where these files
reside).

    regards   Christian Ehrhardt

-- 
THAT'S ALL FOLKS!