[Dovecot] DoveCot IMAP and "inconsistent state" messages

[Ed W]

Chris Richards wrote:
> My other box is Gentoo, and I quite like it.  The biggest problem I 
> had with it was that about a year ago when I was give control of it, 
> it hadn't been synced in like 3 years, and it was so woefully out of 
> date that when I tried to emerge -upDN world, it couldn't reliably 
> upgrade because some packages no longer existed, including core 
> packages (and the system profile).

I was once in this position with a redhat box and it turned out that you 
can't even update it from 3 years ago because they make you re-install 
every couple of years to put on a new OS... 

I can kind of imagine what might of happened  though - was it a hardened 
profile by any chance?  There was some trickiness with upgrading Python 
a couple of years back (as in if you were that far out of date) where 
portage needed a newer version than the older one would install.  It was 
fairly simple to work around if you were familiar with the issues, but 
yes I agree it wasn't ideal.

> Other than that, the only problem I've had was when a Metalog 
> (sysloger) update came out that caused my entire system to hang at 
> boot because the portage package didn't properly move a couple of files.

Sounds like you aren't using vservers yet?

I build a minimal server on the bare iron and then immediately tar it up 
and copy it into /vservers/template.  Then I use the vserver project to 
make it simple to "boot" this chrooted version and customise it a little 
and that then forms the basis for all my real servers.  I usually keep 
about 3 template servers, one vanila-ish install, another setup for PHP 
apps, and another for some rails apps.

Additionally you can easily test out your latest upgrade by simply 
copying a vserver somewhere, boot it, run the upgrade and then shut it 
down again.  Bonus points for using a central package dir so that 
actually when you go back to your proper vserver and run the upgrade it 
actually uses the binary packages and updates in a few seconds...

I bind mount all the dirs in my vservers which contain data to some 
other central storage.  This means for example my dovecot vserver is 
quite small and quick to take a copy, but when you are inside it I bind 
mount all my maildirs into place.  This makes it much simpler to copy 
vservers around and boot them up optionally pointing at the same live 
data as the original vserver (at the same time if you wish)

There is nothing stopping you from starting to convert your current 
servers to this setup.  Just get a compatible kernel on there at your 
next opportunity.  Then grab a roughly suitable stage 4 and unpack it 
somewhere.  "boot it" and recompile it to the state you actually want as 
your base template.  Then copy it a couple of times and start moving 
live services into each vserver one by one.  So you can have DNS in one, 
mail in another, amavis scanning in another, etc.  It's probably fairly 
easy to move services one by one this way without any great hassle and 
eventually you will be all converted except that the base OS is more 
messy than it needs.  Still it will then be easy to migrate the vservers 
between real machines and you can clean down that physical server and 
easily rebuild the base os without anyone noticing...

Good luck

Ed W