dovecot - May 2003 - Creating and renaming mbox folders on NFS auto-installed partitions

I'm trying dovecot-0.99.9.1 in place of uw-imap which ground to a halt
on a 500MHz SunBlade 100 Solaris 8 system which acts as our Departmental
mail server.  INBOXes are mbox files on the servers's local SCSI disk.
But user directories are auto mounted from other Sun NFS servers and
these may contain other mbox mailboxes in a ~/Mail directory.

There's a problem with creating (and with renaming) mailboxes in the NFS
mounted ~/Mail directory.  For an arbitrary mailbox "newbox", say,
dovecot tries to create the parent directory path /home/username/Mail
before creating the newbox file.

But /home/username is automounted and so creating directory /home or
/home/username fails with errno 89 ENOSYS - unsupported file system
operation. 

The solution is to check for the existence of the directory before
trying to create it.  This will work since /home and /home/username will
always exist for any valid user.

I've amended mbox-storage.c in src/lib-storage/index/mbox to call
"access" to do this....

*** src/lib-storage/index/mbox/mbox-storage.c.orig	Tue Apr 15 14:04:02 2003
--- src/lib-storage/index/mbox/mbox-storage.c	Wed May 14 16:04:39 2003
***************
*** 38,44 ****
  			p++;
  		}
  
! 		if (mkdir(dir, CREATE_MODE) < 0 && errno != EEXIST) {
  			t_pop();
  			return -1;
  		}
--- 38,44 ----
  			p++;
  		}
  
! 		if ( (access(dir,F_OK) != 0) && mkdir(dir, CREATE_MODE) < 0
&& errno != EEXIST) {
  			t_pop();
  			return -1;
  		}

- - -
(Could also remove the && errno == EEXIST part - it's redundant 
when access(dir,F_OK) is checking for existence).

Robert
-- 
Robert.Evans at cs.cf.ac.uk Tel:+44(0)29 2087 5518 Fax:+44(0)29 2087 4598
http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/department/staff/Robert.Evans.shtml
Computer Science, Cardiff University, PO Box 916, Cardiff, CF24 3XF, UK

On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 18:37, Robert Evans wrote:
> There's a problem with creating (and with renaming) mailboxes in the
NFS
> mounted ~/Mail directory.  For an arbitrary mailbox "newbox",
say,
> dovecot tries to create the parent directory path /home/username/Mail
> before creating the newbox file.
Yes, I think I'll actually change a bit how that function works. It
almost always needs to create only the last directory, so I'll just
start checking the existence from the second-last directory in it and
start going down until one is found.
> (Could also remove the && errno == EEXIST part - it's redundant
> when access(dir,F_OK) is checking for existence).
Not really, there could be race condition when two sessions try to
create it at the same time (however unlikely that is).