Cyrus, NFS and mail spools

[Gil Freund]

Andrew McNamara wrote:

> Ken Murchison wrote:
> 

[snip]

> 
> We had to make a few small modifications to Cyrus. I think these have
> all been discussed on the list at some time - things like not holding
> files open across rmdir calls. 

Could you elaborate more on this?

> 
> I would suggest the specific combination of NFS client and NFS server was
> important - I doubt any other combination would have been as successful.
> 
> One important detail - we are using local locking (undocumented NFS
> mount option "llock"). When network locking is enabled (default), the
> Solaris NFS client disables all client-side caching of locked files,
> which results in excessive I/O rates. Using "llock" allows client-side
> caching of locked files, but makes it absolutely critical that only one
> Cyrus instance accesses a given volume at any time, and we go to great
> lengths to ensure this is the case.
> 
> I'm not sure we would make the same choice again, but when project was
> initiated SANs were not mature enough, and we had extensive experience
> in running the Solaris/NetApp combination in demanding applications
> (among other things, a very busy multi-terabyte Oracle instance).
> 
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