[Dovecot] Re: Bug? 1.0.0-test28 NFS locking problems

[Matthias Andree]

Tim Southerwood <ts at 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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