[Dovecot] Setting location for indexes

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 10:56 +0200, Thomas Wouters wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 09:47:25AM +0200, dovecot.7.signal11 at spamgourmet.com wrote:
> 
> > We have NFS-mounted user directories which cause significant problems with
> > stale file handles:
> 
> > dovecot: IMAP(uid): fstat() failed with file /home/uid/mail/.imap/INBOX/dovecot.index.log: Stale NFS file handle
> 
> > (a) why can't it just close the file and re-open ?
> 
> NFS has issues with files that are open on one client, and get deleted on
> another. UNIX systems require that files don't disappear while they are in
> use, but NFS is stateless and it simply can't know when a file is in use.
> The result is the 'stale NFS handle' kludge, which also prevents a simple
> close-and-open. Don't use index files on NFS disks.

This is actually a TODO item. Dovecot should be able to handle all
ESTALE errors, but I just haven't implemented them. With
dovecot.index.log handling code the ESTALE is an expected error with NFS
because Dovecot rotates the log file continuously overwriting the
existing one.

Actually the new code in CVS nowadays rotates .log file to .log.2 file,
which should make this problem much more rare.

"First, the file did not disappear - the NFS is flaky under high load,
that's all. Closing and re-opening the file would probably fix the
issue, at least after the traffic spike."

Can this really happen with high NFS load, or is it just that Dovecot
had more time to rotate its log files? I'm not sure if I can reliably
fix the ESTALE problems if they happen randomly with the file actually
being lost.

> > (b) is there a way to specify with the 'default_mail_env' (or in some other way)
> > the location of **only** the indexes (and let dovecot autodetect all else?).
> 
> Haven't figured that one out myself either :)

Guess not. New configuration file code has split them to different
settings though, that'll fix it. Now if I only could get all that code
to work so I could commit it.. :)

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