Trouble after moving directories and symlinking

[Jay Drake]

Hi all, and thanks in advance for any help you can provide for me. I'll
start by noting that I am fairly new at using linux and even more new at
trying to admin a mail server so I probably won't know what information to
give or how to find the information you ask me for. I appreciate your
patience.

Now for my problem. Someone helped me get Cyrus up and running nearly a year
ago and it's done just fine for me with no need to do anything other than
add and remove users as we gained and lost employees at the company I work
for until this morning when it suddenly stopped receiving or sending mail. A
very quick look into this showed that the reason was simply that the /var/
partition was FULL. I managed to do some clean up and restart the server and
everything was fine, but there was still very little room on the /var/
partition so I figured I needed a better long term solution.

The solution I came up with was to move the following directories to the
/usr/ partition (which has plenty of free space.) and then make symlinks to
the /usr/ partition.

/var/spool/mail/ to /usr/mail/
/var/spool/mqueue/ to /usr/mqueue/
/var/spool/imap/ to /usr/imap/

First I stopped the server, then moved the directories as above. I then
created symlinks from the old location to the new location and started the
server.

I then tried to send test messages to myself from another email account.
None came through.

Next I tried to send messages from my account to another email account. None
went through.

Both the outgoing email and the bounce return mails gave an error something
along the lines of:

421 4.3.0 collect:
    Cannot write ./dfi0MJf7Se019196 (bfcommit, uid=0, gid=51):
    No such file or directory

I checked the ownership and permissions of the directories against a
friend's server and everything seemed to be in order. I hope someone can
help me track down and fix this, as I have spent better than half the day
working on it and am now at a complete loss.

Thanks again,

Jay Drake
jaydrake at jaysnest.net