[Dovecot] test80: assert/core debug info

[Jeff A. Earickson]

On Wed, 17 Aug 2005, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 17:16:51 +0300
> From: Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi>
> To: Jeff A. Earickson <jaearick at colby.edu>
> Cc: dovecot at dovecot.org
> Subject: Re: [Dovecot] test80: assert/core debug info
> 
> On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 07:26 -0400, Jeff A. Earickson wrote:
>> Timo,
>>
>> Thank you, the patch solved the problem of core dumps and asserts.
>> There have been none in the last eight hours since I applied the
>> patch.  The syslog output has much fewer complaints.  There are occasional
>> mail.error syslog warnings like:
>>
>> IMAP(user): UIDs broken with partial sync in mbox file /var/mail/user
>>
>> and one occurance of:
>>
>> IMAP(user): mbox sync: UID inserted in the middle of mailbox /var/mail/user (195 > 34, seq=2, idx_msgs=31)
>>
>> Anything to worry about?
>
> They aren't exactly good, but shouldn't really happen either. The first
> one is completely transparent to users, the second one probably send
> some error to client.
>
> If you can figure out a way to reproduce any of these, I'd like to know.
> I haven't seen them myself for a long time.
>
> Although if locking is set wrong, these can happen. Can your users
> access the mboxes directly or using some other software than Dovecot?
>
My lock setting is the default (the conf file is #lock_method = fcntl).
Yes, users can hit their mailboxes by other means.  The IMAP server
(dovecot) is also the machine that people can login to interactively.
System mailboxes are NFS mounted from the mail server, which people cannot
login to.  Pine users on IMAP server typically hit their mailbox directly
via the NFS mount, but this can be easily changed so they go thru dovecot
IMAP.  The mail server is also the POP server, running qpopper
(I should probably change to dovecot there).  People are admonished to
use either POP or IMAP but not both.

The reasons for this setup are historical and security-related.  The IMAP
and interactive login server has to remain different from the mail/POP
server and the NFS mount must remain.  Other than that, I am open to
suggestions for improvement here.  The two things I should do are:

* make pine users go thru IMAP
* change from qpopper POP to dovecot POP on the mail server

Jeff Earickson
Colby College