[Dovecot] Dovecot index, NFS, and multiple architectures

[Timo Sirainen]

On Jun 18, 2008, at 9:12 PM, David Halik wrote:

> Now this setup is just a test example and not exactly what we'll be  
> running in production, but it tipped up the problem either way.  
> Since the index is shared by both the Linux i386 machine and the  
> sparc64 Solaris machine, if mail is accessed from both, lets say  
> with Pine for example, the index becomes corrupted and breaks. As  
> long as only one architecture only ever touches it there are no  
> issues.

It should only log "architecture changed" and rebuild the index. I did  
some fixed related to this at some point though, might have been only  
for v1.1.

> I'm assuming this is an endian issue, which would make the most  
> sense. Is there a way around this with flags or server options? Is  
> this something that has maybe been addressed in 1.1.0?

No. I once thought about making it endianess-independent, but rejected  
the idea soon after I figured out that it would unnecessarily slow  
down nearly-100% of users and the code would become really ugly.

Although this reminds me .. dbox does rely on indexes more than mbox/ 
maildir. Perhaps there should be code that attempts to preserve and  
convert the important data (flags, keywords) from different endianess  
indexes. But this still wouldn't make it possible to quickly switch  
between architectures.

One thing you could do is to specify different index files paths for  
your installations. For example for sparc64:

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:INDEX=~/Maildir/sparc64

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