"xfer doesn't work", "reconstruct fails", "mbexamine useless"

Hello!

Poorly, sorry, I have not a bug report with a "how to reproduce" for  
you. Over a longer period I thougth about sending a mail like this to  
the list, or not.

I love cyrus-imapd and so don't take my mail as a bashing or kind like  
that. Take it just as a report from a cyrus-imapd murder admin.

We use cyrus-imapd since years... I guess round about 2.0.something.  
First not in a murder but started with that a long time ago. Atm we  
have about 20k users with about 10T data (productice one proxy and 7  
backend with v. 3.4.7).

My sorrows and my problems are that some important functions and  
features brakes too often. My feeling is that "no one" (at least not  
at the side of the developers) knows about cyrus-impad in "bigger"  
environments. Are we big or small? Depends on the point of view.

So what fails here? What are the *main* recurrings problems?

The MUA no longer see new mails.
You can check and try everithing... forget it. The only way: Delete  
and touch new cyrus.cache and cyrus.index and do a reconstruct and add  
every mails as a new one. Is this nice, is this "ok"? Hm... let's say  
"sometimes good, sometimes dad". As sysadmin you do not know if a  
important person can not see an important mail. But in most cases no  
other new mails will be shown so you get the notice and call from the  
user. Seens states are gone, some ohter informatinos, too. In most  
cases we can live with that.

xfers stucks in the middle of nowhere
The biggest trouble is an update. Minor updates doesn't care. You will  
see some more "missing mail" problems but you know how to fix. The  
xfer ist if you start it and in the middle it breaks down and a part  
is on the old and another part on the new node. It takes too much time  
to fix all by hand (whti the hope the mailbox woll work on the new  
server!).
I remember one upgrade procedure with xfer which work mostly: Before  
the xfer we started 3(!) reconstructs on the mailbox. Because some  
errors could be found by reconstruct but some crashed xfer too. So you  
needed to loop the reconstruct sometimes. Only about 0.1% of the boxes  
chrashed during this xfer. It was a success!
Sidenote: We have experience with local upgrades, with rsync to other  
machine an upgradt there... every way what taken in the past.

I do not speak about missing, incomplete functionality. In the first  
days of the murder we hoped to have the possibility to do a lot of  
tasks on the proxy. But we saw that we needed to do a lot of jobs on  
the backend. No problem, just feature wishes... I don't talk about this.

At the moment I would like to upgrade von 3.4->3.8. But the xfer of  
the first mailbox (my own one) faild. I can make a test, I can xfer a  
small, new testing box... but my mbx is old, has a lot of mails. It is  
a good thing to test such a mailbox to transfer. But it fails...

So what are cyrus admins like me missing? Software has bugs. This is  
normal, this is "ok". It is our job to live with  that and find fixes  
and solutions. But my feeling is that the developers don't use murdes  
setups, don't know bigger sites... F.e. see the last release where  
murder was completely broken. "Aha, I am right! They don't have a  
murder running! it is only know by paper".
The other REALY missing thing is a reconstruct or test command, which  
"fails" or reports if somethin is failed or broken in the mailbox.  
Maybe no fix for the mailbox but I need to know if something is broken  
there. I NEED a check to see which mail in the mailbox breakes  
everything. It is ok for me if I need to remove this mail f.e.x
One word to mbexamine. I never understoop why, when for what it  
helped. Checking my nearby empty inbox with "-c" says "Failed to parse  
file" on one message. But my MUA can open and show it to me. What  
mbxeamine not says: Why does an xfer breaks down. And don't think  
about reconstruct - everythin is perfekt! So what to do with this  
mail? What to do next?

So it is my fault not to report the bugs and errors. But it is not  
easy if I can not write down a "how to reproduce". If I can not pass  
the real data to you because of the privacy. With every new release I  
hoped I would become bettet. Better tests in reconstruct, less xfer  
crashes and so on. But I don't know. No I think I give it a try with  
this mail. The main goal for me would be a "new" mailbox test, a  
reconstruct which REALY can see or fix problems. but how? Is this  
possible?

So are there other cyrus admins out there with the same problems? Or  
are we the only one with problems like this?

Excuse my open words. I don't want to blame. And if so I am the one  
who can not send goog bugreports for problems like this. I need to  
blame myself. :-/



-- 
Liebe Gruesse, with best regards
Stephan Lauffer

Pedagogical University Freiburg - Germany
http://www.ph-freiburg.de/zik/


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