[CentOS] vpopmail over NFS not seeing new messages.

Tue Feb 28 13:20:59 UTC 2006
Paul Schoonderwoerd <paul at pollux-it.nl>


On Tuesday 28 February 2006 13:29, Will McDonald wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> We've just migrated our back-end NFS mailstore from FC1 systems to
> CentOS4 and are experiencing problems/delays with vpopmail and user
> Maildirs. IMAP is fine, it's just POP access that causes us problems.
>
> Now, NFS mounts successfully, the clients can see /home/vpopmail and
> serve content as we would expect. IMAP works perfectly and sees new
> messages as soon as they're delivered into the Maildir, but POP
> doesn't seem to see new messages until about 90 minutes after it
> arrived.
>
> Messages can be seen in users' Maildir/new on the filesystem. The
> timestamps on new messages on the NFS filesystems don't appear to be
> formatted correctly, I'm guessing this could cause the POP weirdness?
>
> On an NFS client...
> [root at mailserv2 new]# ls -ltr
> total 4
> -rw-------  1 vpopmail vchkpw 854 Feb 28  2006
> 1141126119.27119.mailserv1,S=773
>
> Whereas on the NFS mailstore...
> [root at tempmailstore1a new]# ls -ltr
> total 4
> -rw-------  1 vpopmail vchkpw 854 Feb 28 12:44
> 1141126119.27119.mailserv1,S=773
>
> 'touch'ing the files, either from the client or server doesn't appear
> to fix the timestamps.
>
> The old FC mailstores were running...
> kernel 2.4.22-1.2188.nptl
> nfs-utils-1.0.6-1
> DRBD 0.6.12
> heartbeat-1.0.4-2.fr.c.1.um.2
>
> The new CentOS mailstores and all their clients are running...
> kernel 2.6.9-22.0.1.ELsmp
> nfs-utils-1.0.6-65.EL4
> DRBD 0.7.14
> heartbeat-1.2.3.cvs.20050927-1.centos4
> Qmailrocks 2.2.0
>
> /etc/exports on the mailstores contains...
> /mnt/drbd/      mailserv1(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
> /mnt/drbd/      mailserv2(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
> /mnt/drbd/      mailserv3(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
> /mnt/drbd/      mailserv4(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
>
> And the NFS mounts on the client mailservers look like...
>
> mailstore1:/mnt/drbd/home /home nfs defaults 0 0
>
> If anyone's seen this or can shed any light it'd be much appreciated.
>
> Will.
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> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos


IMHO looks more like a POP issue to me although the time representation seems 
odd. But this could be nfs-client related. What does it look like when you 
mount a share locally on the server where it is exported ?

I'm thinking locking/timing/uid's/accessrights...

Is there anything in the log about POP ? Is it possible to run in debug-mode 
to generate some ?

Optional: dovecot imap server will also do pop.

-- 
Paul Schoonderwoerd
Pollux IT - Open Source & Netwerkbeveiliging
tel: 0294-283832
http://www.Pollux-IT.nl