[Dovecot] Oddities with Debian unstable dovecot

[Blair Zajac]

Hello,

I'm running an Debian etch box with unstable and ever since the last upgrade to dovecot, I've seen odd things.  At times, I would see emails would go missing from the Inbox or other folders, and I couldn't move emails that were moved from the Inbox to another folder back into the Inbox.   These have seen gone away since I removed all dovecot.* files and .index* files from my Maildir's and let Dovecot regenerate them as needed.

The most current thing are these errors:

dovecot: Aug 30 11:38:33 Error: IMAP(blair): file mail-transaction-log-view.c: l
ine 183 (mail_transaction_log_view_set): assertion failed: (max_file_offset == (
uoff_t)-1 || max_file_offset <= file->sync_offset)

dovecot: Aug 30 13:05:21 Info: imap-login: Login: ashley [127.0.0.1]
dovecot: Aug 30 13:14:06 Error: IMAP(ashley): Corrupted index cache file /home/ashley/Maildir/dovecot.index.cache: record points outside file

Anything I can do to help here?  I don't have a core file, even though I have 'mail_drop_priv_before_exec = yes'.

The other odd thing I noticed is after running /etc/init.d/dovecot stop, I would have several imap processes left over in my uid.  They don't do much:

# strace -p 5014
Process 5014 attached - interrupt to quit
gettimeofday({1125460345, 997748}, {420, 0}) = 0
gettimeofday({1125460345, 998465}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=8, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI|POLLERR|POLLHUP|POLLNVAL}, {fd=0, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI|POLLERR|POLLHUP|POLLNVAL}], 2, 410) = 0
gettimeofday({1125460346, 410768}, {420, 0}) = 0
gettimeofday({1125460346, 410890}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=8, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI|POLLERR|POLLHUP|POLLNVAL}, {fd=0, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI|POLLERR|POLLHUP|POLLNVAL}], 2, 0) = 0
gettimeofday({1125460346, 411940}, {420, 0}) = 0
gettimeofday({1125460346, 412551}, NULL) = 0

However, lsof shows that the file descriptor 8 is a pipe back to fd 9 in the same process.  Why would poll() be polling it's own file descriptor?  Is this normal?  Is this process waiting to do a fork later on and communicate with a child?

# lsof -p 5014
COMMAND  PID  USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE    SIZE    NODE NAME
imap    5014 blair  cwd    DIR    8,4    4096 6619138 /home/blair
imap    5014 blair  rtd    DIR    8,4    4096       2 /
imap    5014 blair  txt    REG    8,4  420168 4572306 /usr/lib/dovecot/imap
imap    5014 blair  mem    REG    0,0               0 [heap] (stat: No such file or directory)
imap    5014 blair  mem    REG    8,4 1178624 6636723 /home/blair/Maildir/dovecot.index.cache
imap    5014 blair  mem    REG    8,4   20148 6636742 /home/blair/Maildir/dovecot.index
imap    5014 blair  mem    REG    8,4 1265136 6996193 /lib/tls/libc-2.3.5.so
imap    5014 blair  mem    REG    8,4    9592 6996195 /lib/tls/libdl-2.3.5.so
imap    5014 blair  mem    REG    8,4   21568 6636721 /home/blair/Maildir/dovecot.index.log
imap    5014 blair  mem    REG    8,4   88924 6995972 /lib/ld-2.3.5.so
imap    5014 blair    0u  IPv4 160155             TCP localhost.localdomain:imap2->localhost.localdomain:47852 (ESTABLISHED)
imap    5014 blair    1u  IPv4 160155             TCP localhost.localdomain:imap2->localhost.localdomain:47852 (ESTABLISHED)
imap    5014 blair    2w  FIFO    0,5          160165 pipe
imap    5014 blair    3r   CHR    1,9           16396 /dev/urandom
imap    5014 blair    4u   REG    8,4 1178624 6636723 /home/blair/Maildir/dovecot.index.cache
imap    5014 blair    5r   DIR    8,4   77824 6930433 /home/blair/Maildir/new
imap    5014 blair    6r   DIR    8,4  118784 6900850 /home/blair/Maildir/cur
imap    5014 blair    8r  FIFO    0,5          160244 pipe
imap    5014 blair    9w  FIFO    0,5          160244 pipe
imap    5014 blair   10u   REG    8,4   20148 6636742 /home/blair/Maildir/dovecot.index
imap    5014 blair   11u   REG    8,4   21568 6636721 /home/blair/Maildir/dovecot.index.log

Regards,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac, Ph.D.
<blair at orcaware.com>
Subversion and Orca training and consulting
http://www.orcaware.com/svn/