dovecot - Apr 2011 - Invalid old index files

Hi,

i'm in the process of evaluating dovecot. I have a rather big testing 
environment with four dovecot director frontend instances and four 
dovecot backend instances. Mailboxes are all in mdbox format and stored 
on nfs. Indexes are stored locally. dovecot nfs setup for high 
performance is used (mmap_disable = no, dotlock_use_excl = yes, 
mail_nfs_storage = yes, mail_nfs_index = no).

The remaining problem is, if i disable a backend server and the backend 
server which took over the connection already has some old index files, 
this index files aren't updated. If there aren't any index files all is 
fine and the index files are created anew. I can solve this by regularly 
deleting old index files via a cronjob. But i'm not sure if i made a 
configuration mistake and dovecot somehow can detect old index files 
automatically and invalidate them?

Thanks in advance
Reinhard

On 5.4.2011, at 16.59, Reinhard Vicinus wrote:
> i'm in the process of evaluating dovecot. I have a rather big testing
environment with four dovecot director frontend instances and four dovecot
backend instances. Mailboxes are all in mdbox format and stored on nfs. Indexes
are stored locally.
With mdbox you must not lose indexes! They contain very important information
that doesn't exist elsewhere, like what mailboxes mails exist in and what
flags they have. You really need to keep index files on NFS too.
> dovecot nfs setup for high performance is used (mmap_disable = no,
dotlock_use_excl = yes, mail_nfs_storage = yes, mail_nfs_index = no).
With director you can keep mail_nfs_*=no. Also note that to deliver mails you
need to use LMTP via directors.