Michael Loftis wrote:

Don't use Cyrus over NFS. It's not safe. You *WILL* end up with corrupt mailboxes.

There might be some NFS Client+Server combinations that are safe, but since you've a Linux client I'm guessing your NFS server is also Linux, a known not-safe configuration. The reason is file locking doesn't' really work on NFS.

Plus, couple of days ago I stumbled accross data corruption problem when file on NFS mounted partition is mmaped on Linux client (CentOS 4, which is RHEL 4 clone, kernel 2.6.9-5.0.3.EL). Quick grep of Cyrus sources shows that Cyrus uses mmap in several places in the code, and I would guess DB libraries also make use of it. So even if the file locking worked, there are more severe problems on Linux NFS clients. This might or might not be connected with the problem OP experienced. Basically, people running Cyrus over NFS on Centos4/RHEL4 (and probably other distros) should get a bit worried.


I found the problem when experimenting with one small app for creating nul-filled files that is good candidate for "the most stupid use of mmap that can trash your PC just like that". Note that I haven't got confirmation that folks over at Red Hat were able to reproduce the problem. I tested with single NFS client and single NFS server, so there is probability that the problem is not general and exists only in specific configurations. More info at:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=151284

--
Aleksandar Milivojevic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7
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