[Dovecot] Dovecot and NFS with file locking

[Ben Winslow]

Nate Sanders wrote:
> Greetings all,
> 
> I'm trying to get an understanding of a problem we are facing here.
> We're currently running dovecot 1.0-beta3 and have a long standing issue
> of system crashes on our mail server (Debian Linux 2.4.27-2-k7-smp).
> 
> Here's what is happening:
> 
> The machine hangs and the system load climbs as high as 80.0+. Yet, the
> system response is not effected. Command line is still responds
> instantly. There are multiple running dovecot PIDs, even if I stop the
> service. If I try to kill or -9 the PIDs, they will not die. The machine
> is DOA and must be forcefully restarted. Issuing a reboot will cause the
> machine to hang when it attempts to unmount network shares.
> 

It sounds like NFS is dying one way or another -- likely due to a bug on
either the client side (you could try compiling a newer 2.4 or 2.6
kernel) or the server side (I know jack about NFS on IRIX.)  If you look
at the tasks in ps or top, the 'state' column is probably 'D' indicating
an uninterruptible sleep (which usually means the process is hung
waiting for an IO request to complete.)

Are there any messages in the kernel log indicating NFS timeouts?
Specifying 'intr' in the nfs mount options might enable you to actually
kill the running dovecot processes, unmount, and remount, but that won't
solve your real problem.

-- 
Ben Winslow <rain at bluecherry.net>

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