Cyrus IMAPD 2.4: Release early, release often

[Patrick Goetz]

On 11/18/2010 02:36 PM, Alessandro Bono wrote:
> it's not difficult if your old installation use only skiplist db, and
> maybe also with db4.x with new cyrus imapd 2.4
>

BTW, included below is an outline of how to do such a migration which I 
sent to the cyrus user list about a month ago.  Unfortunately I never 
got a response to this, leaving several critical questions unanswered.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: cyrus db files
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2010 09:47:19 -0500
From: Patrick Goetz <pgoetz at mail.utexas.edu>
To: info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu <info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu>

Hi -

No one ever responded to this.  If I can find out what db files in
/var/lib/cyrus are necessary for a successful transfer of metadata to to 
a new server, I'll write up a wiki entry for this procedure.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: messages in mailbox aren't\H\H\H visible
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:46:42 -0500
From: Patrick Goetz <pgoetz at mail.utexas.edu>
To: info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu <info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu>

This brings back the issue of a safe, canonical procedure for moving a
(single server) cyrus mail system to a new server.  Since particularly
new users frequently have problems with this (including me, when I first
started using cyrus).

I'm thinking something like this. Suppose there were a command, say
called ctl_cyrusdb2, which offered the same features as ctl_mboxlist,
but could be used on any cyrus db file, e.g.
    ctl_cyrusdb2 -d cyrus_db
dumps the cyrus_db database.. (The following also assumes ssh
authorized_keys have been set.)

    On the old_cyrus_server:
    -----------------------
    stop cyrus
    for i in `cat /var/lib/cyrus/cyrus_db_list`
      do
      ctl_cyrusdb2 -d $i | ssh new_server "cd /var/lib/cyrus &&
ctl_cyrusdb2 -u -"
      done
      (cd /var/spool/cyrus; tar cf - .) | ssh new_server "cd
/var/spool/cyrus && tar xpf - "
    -----------------------

     start cyrus on new_server and you're done -- a total of 4
command-line commands (viewing the for as a single command).

There are a few problems with this in addition to the absence of a
ctl_cyrusdb2, namely it's still unclear what cyrus db files are created
and why.  On my system, I have:
    annotations.db deliver.db mailboxes.db tls_sessions.db
but also have
    db:
     __db.001  __db.002  __db.003  __db.004  __db.005  __db.006
log.0000000001  skipstamp
and
    user/[a-z]/{user_name.seen, user_name.sub}

Are the contents of db important for migration?  And why isn't the stuff
in /var/lib/cyrus/user stored in the appropriate location in
/var/spool/cyrus?  From the file names, this seems like important
metadata that users would want to see preserved.  I suppose all this
could be handled with no extra knowledge on the admin user's part by
populating the /var/lib/cyrus/cyrus_db_list file only with the database
names necessary for successful replication of metadata.


Finally, I see many instances of the following error message in
/var/log/syslog:

Oct 14 16:33:01 www cyrus/imap[32001]: IOERROR: opening
/var/lib/cyrus/user_deny.db: No such file or directory

Apparently
     touch /var/lib/cyrus/user_deny.db
is not a solution, either:
http://www.mail-archive.com/info-cyrus@lists.andrew.cmu.edu/msg39304.html

2 questions about this:

1.
I have rsyslog configured to log all mail stuff to /var/log/mail.*; e.g.
      *.=info;*.=notice;*.=warn;\
         auth,authpriv.none;\
         cron,daemon.none;\
         mail.none,news.none     -/var/log/messages

So why is anything from cyrus being written to syslog at all?  This
message should be going to /var/log/mail.err, as far as I can tell.  Is
this a compile-time error?

2.
Under any circumstance, shouldn't this error message be written to the
log files only when cyrus is started?


-- 
Patrick Goetz