dovecot - Jul 2007 - apparent bug with filesystem quota and message lists

Don't know if anyone else uses Berkeley derived filesystem quota, but 
IBM's AIX does.  A little over a week after migrating from UWIMAP to DC 
(with mbox format unchanged) everything is clean except for this one 
problem:
When users go over quota, when they login the next time, the folder list 
is blank.  You can imagine the panicked calls to the Helpdesk.  If their 
quotas are raised or re-graced, Get Mail returns the expected list. This 
behavior happens with a variety of clients: Pine, MacMail,TBird, Horde 
Webmail, etc.
The index filesystem has no quota on it.

I would have to imagine the Dovecot is using (or trying to use) some 
space in the quota'ed filesystems which the operating system won't 
allow, and this results in there being an empty file that DC uses for 
the message list sent to the client.  There are NO messages in syslog 
(other than the expected login and logout) indicating any problems.  Our 
legacy setup has the inboxes in /var/spool/mail, and the folders in 
~/mail.  The problem can happen either place.

dovecot -n returns:
> # 1.0.1: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf
> listen: *:143
> ssl_listen: *:993
> disable_plaintext_auth: no
> login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
> login_executable: /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
> login_processes_count: 12
> login_max_processes_count: 774
> verbose_proctitle: yes
> first_valid_uid: 200
> mail_location: mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/dcindx/%u
> mbox_dirty_syncs: no
> mbox_lazy_writes: no
> auth default:
>   passdb:
>     driver: pam
>   userdb:
>     driver: passwd
Suggestions?

-- 
===Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources 
Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York  12504  
sdean at bard.edu  voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035

Haven't heard from Timo yet, but in my research on migrate to the 
maildir format from my present mbox standard, I stumbled over this in 
the Maildir Configuration wiki page:
>
> Dovecot can't currently handle not being able to write the control 
> files, so it will cause problems with filesystem quota 
> <http://wiki.dovecot.org/Quota/FS>. To avoid problems with this, you 
> should place control files into a partition where quota isn't checked. 
> You can specify this by adding :CONTROL=<path> to mail_location, for 
> example:
>
> mail_location = *maildir*:~/*Maildir*:CONTROL=/var/no-quota/%u
>   
This, of course is for Maildir format, while I am currently using mbox.  
My current mail_location line looks like this:
mail_location: mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/dcindx/%u
can/should I do something like this to fix my problem:?
mail_location: mbox:~/mail:CONTROL=/var/no-quota/%u 
:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/dcindx/%u

FWIW, there is no quota on the index filesystem (/var/dcindx).

Relying further on the kinde

Stewart Dean wrote:
> Don't know if anyone else uses Berkeley derived filesystem quota, but 
> IBM's AIX does.  A little over a week after migrating from UWIMAP to 
> DC (with mbox format unchanged) everything is clean except for this 
> one problem:
> When users go over quota, when they login the next time, the folder 
> list is blank.  You can imagine the panicked calls to the Helpdesk.  
> If their quotas are raised or re-graced, Get Mail returns the expected 
> list. This behavior happens with a variety of clients: Pine, 
> MacMail,TBird, Horde Webmail, etc.
> The index filesystem has no quota on it.
>
> I would have to imagine the Dovecot is using (or trying to use) some 
> space in the quota'ed filesystems which the operating system won't 
> allow, and this results in there being an empty file that DC uses for 
> the message list sent to the client.  There are NO messages in syslog 
> (other than the expected login and logout) indicating any problems.  
> Our legacy setup has the inboxes in /var/spool/mail, and the folders 
> in ~/mail.  The problem can happen either place.
>
> dovecot -n returns:
>> # 1.0.1: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf
>> listen: *:143
>> ssl_listen: *:993
>> disable_plaintext_auth: no
>> login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
>> login_executable: /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
>> login_processes_count: 12
>> login_max_processes_count: 774
>> verbose_proctitle: yes
>> first_valid_uid: 200
>> mail_location:
mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u:INDEX=/var/dcindx/%u
>> mbox_dirty_syncs: no
>> mbox_lazy_writes: no
>> auth default:
>>   passdb:
>>     driver: pam
>>   userdb:
>>     driver: passwd
> Suggestions?
>
-- 
===Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources 
Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York  12504  
sdean at bard.edu  voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035

On Mon, 2007-07-30 at 11:34 -0400, Stewart Dean wrote:
> When users go over quota, when they login the next time, the folder list 
> is blank.
I don't see why this would happen. Listing mailboxes doesn't try to
write anything to filesystem. Can you try this yourself by making an
account over quota and then trying what LIST command shows?

1 login user pass
2 list "" *
3 lsub "" *

Although if the client tries to always SUBSCRIBE to mailboxes, even if
they already are, then Dovecot probably fails. But it should log an
error then.

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