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Date:      Tue, 30 Nov 2010 02:48:07 +0100
From:      Leon =?iso-8859-15?Q?Me=DFner?= <l.messner@physik.tu-berlin.de>
To:        Adam McDougall <mcdouga9@egr.msu.edu>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Stale NFS file handles on 8.x amd64
Message-ID:  <20101130014807.GC98014@emmi.physik-pool.tu-berlin.de>
In-Reply-To: <4CF44E2E.4070700@egr.msu.edu>
References:  <4CF44E2E.4070700@egr.msu.edu>

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Hi,

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 08:06:54PM -0500, Adam McDougall wrote:
> I've been running dovecot 1.1 on FreeBSD 7.x for a while with a bare 
> minimum of NFS problems, but it got worse with 8.x.  I have 2-4 servers 
> (usually just 2) accessing mail on a Netapp over NFSv3 via imapd. 
> delivery is via procmail which doesn't touch the dovecot metadata and 
> webmail uses imapd.  Client connections to imapd go to random servers 
> and I don't yet have solid means to keep certain users on certain 
> servers.  I upgraded some of the servers to 8.x and dovecot 1.2 and ran 
> into Stale NFS file handles causing index/uidlist corruption causing 
> inboxes to appear as empty when they were not.  In some situations their 
> corrupt index had to be deleted manually.  I first suspected dovecot 1.2 
> since it was upgraded at the same time but I downgraded to 1.1 and its 
> doing the same thing.  I don't really have a wealth of details to go on 
> yet and I usually stay quiet until I do, and half the time it is 
> difficult to reproduce myself so I've had to put it in production to get 
> a feel for progress.  This only happens a dozen or so times per weekday 
> but I feel the need to start taking bigger steps.  I'll probably do what 

Does it depend on the size of the message?

> I can to get IMAP back on a stable base (7.x?) and also try to debug 8.x 
> on the remaining servers.  A binary search is within possibility if I 
> can reproduce the symptoms often enough even if I have to put a test 
> server in production for a few hours.
> 
> Any tips on where we could start looking, or alterations I could try 
> making such as sysctls to return to older behavior?  It might be worth 

there were some problems on nullfs mounted nfs shares (like in jails)
and dovecot, as dovecot changed its location for temporary file creation
to the user home. But IIRC the error message looked more like:
http://www.mail-archive.com/dovecot@dovecot.org/msg26856.html
And are fixed in stable.

Just a hint,
Leon



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