Subject: Re: inbox gets corrupted

From: Shivaji Navale <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 21:08:34 +0530 (IST)

Hi,

 We have this peculiar problem for the Mailboxes of users
 /var/spool/mail/username.
 The mailboxes get corrupted asto the first 20-26 lines of mailbox get
 DELETED.

 I had gone through the doc on the pine site regarding the locking problme
 over NFS. how can this problem be  overcome.

Also we recently upgraded to pine-4.58, and on setting the
domain-name=req_domain ,the domain name was still the hostname, instead of
reqd_domain.

 We are using 2.4.20-18.8.um.1 kernel on the (LVS Director) which exports
 the mail partition to 30 NFS/NIS clients.

 This mail is similar to one i posted on NFS lists.

Thanks
-shivaji

 -- EVERYONE should contribute to THE BEST of their capacity
 for THE DEVELOPMENT of THE NATION
 					 -- A P J KALAM

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From: Shivaji Navale <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 14:21:25 +0530 (IST)

Pls could anyone help me/give some pointer.

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From: James Roberts Kirkpatrick <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 09:37:18 -0700 (MST)

One posibility is that you have disk quotas enabled, and users that bump
into that get the corruption because the file cannot be rewritten
correctly. Or, the disk volume is running out of room.

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From: Shivaji Navale <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 00:00:35 +0530 (IST)

Hi,

We donot have any disk quotas enabled on the /var/spool/mail partition.
I did come to know from the docs on the site, that this kind of problem is
due to  appending of the mailbox, even while pine is holding the mailbox
in NFS.

This problem is flaring and many users complain of this mailbox errors.
We had upgraded to pine4.58 now.

How would this problem be overcome.

thanks,
shivaji

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From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 Dec 2003 10:30:58 +0000 (GMT)

> How would this problem be overcome.

I don't have experience with Pine and NFS but I have been reading
the Pine discussion groups for years and I think the consensus is
"Don't do that!" It is much more robust to set up an IMAP server
and access those mailboxes via IMAP rather than using direct file
access. When you built Pine, the UW imap daemon was also built so
all you need to do is install it, turn it on, and change
inbox-path to something like:

 inbox-path={your.imap.server/user=UID}INBOX

and with luck, the corruption problems will be solved.

Also, make sure that you read this FAQ

 <http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/sysadmins.html#11.5>

which discusses the importance of /var/spool/mail having 1777
permission.

Hope this helps,
Nancy

-- 
Nancy McGough
Infinite Ink ~ <http://www.ii.com>
Deflexion & Reflexion ~ <http://deflexion.com>

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From: Shivaji Navale <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 14:37:09 +0530 (IST)

Thanks a lot, i got to know where the problem is now and how it can be
resolved, after a long period of head cracking.

thanks again to the GURU's at PINE

regards,
shivaji

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From: Shivaji Navale <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 01:42:22 +0530 (IST)

Hi,

Sorry for bothering you again.
As I am currently busy with my acads due to deadlines, i would appreciate
if my query relating to imap is satisfied.

Does having IMAP over mailboxes over NFS provide better locking as
compared to pine directly accessing mailboxes (w/o imap) on NFS clients.

Exporting the mails over NFS to 4 clients (load sharing servers) then
doing a imap only connection to these mailboxes, rather than directly accessing inboxes from
pine.

This would allow me to give a final thought on deciding to revoke the mail
partiton over NFS completely.
And making  users re-enter passwd after login for accessing mails via
imap in pine.

eagerly waiting for ur reply.

thanks,
shivaji

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From: Gopi Sundaram <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 14:49:25 -0600 (CST)

> compared to pine directly accessing mailboxes (w/o imap) on NFS

Putting mailboxes on an NFS-mounted partition is bad in almost every
case. The exceptions are if there is only one client accessing the
mailbox across NFS (in which case why is it on NFS in the first place?)
or sometimes if you are running Solaris, where file locking across NFS
might occasionally work (with a modern NFS client that does the right
thing, and a modern NFS server that does too).

Too risky. Don't do it.

Or use Maildir (yuck) on NFS, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
Courier IMAP (yuck2) does Maildirs fine, but doesn't do IMAP very well.

-- 
Gopi Sundaram
http://www.zrox.net/Mail/Pine/

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From: Shivaji Navale <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 02:31:04 +0530 (IST)

Hi,

thanks.
Made up my mind now to have imap only access of mailboxes on the NIS/NFS
clients.

Is there anyway the user's doesnot have to re-enter the same login passwd
after being logged in to the system, to access his mailbox via imap in
pine.
Explaining this if i would have not made by point my clear.
Since we have users login into NIS/NFS clients and the pine therein would
be configured to have inbox over imap (as told by Nancy).
But then the user would have to re-enter his passwd to access his inbox.

It would be better if there is a soln or we can still live with the double
passwd's.

thanks
shivaji

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From: Gopi Sundaram <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 16:16:13 -0600 (CST)

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Shivaji Navale wrote:

> Is there anyway the user's doesnot have to re-enter the same login
> passwd after being logged in to the system, to access his mailbox via
> imap in pine.

Read about pre-authenticated IMAP sessions using rsh or ssh, or the
PASSFILE option.