constant cyrus failures with DBERROR db4

[Paul Raines]

We are having constant problems with cyrus locking up and filling
up the system log with gigabytes of errors like this:

Sep  8 13:07:09 mail master[23769]: process 21100 exited, status 75
Sep  8 13:07:09 mail master[23769]: service imaps pid 21100 in READY state: 
terminated abnormally
Sep  8 13:07:09 mail lmtpunix[21102]: DBERROR db4: PANIC: fatal region 
error detected; run recovery
Sep  8 13:07:09 mail lmtpunix[21102]: DBERROR: critical database situation
Sep  8 13:07:09 mail master[21103]: about to exec 
/usr/lib64/cyrus-imapd/imapd
Sep  8 13:07:09 mail master[21104]: about to exec 
/usr/lib64/cyrus-imapd/imapd
Sep  8 13:07:09 mail pop3[21101]: DBERROR db4: PANIC: fatal region error 
detected; run recovery
Sep  8 13:07:09 mail pop3[21101]: DBERROR: critical database situation
Sep  8 13:07:09 mail master[21105]: about to exec 
/usr/lib64/cyrus-imapd/pop3d
Sep  8 13:07:09 mail master[21106]: about to exec 
/usr/lib64/cyrus-imapd/pop3d
Sep  8 13:07:09 mail imap[21103]: DBERROR db4: PANIC: fatal region error 
detected; run recovery

till of course the / partition is full and then all hell breaks loose.

We can get things going again by doing the following which I found
via a search on the web:

service cyrus-imapd stop
/bin/rm /var/lib/imap/db/log.*
su - cyrus -c "/usr/lib64/cyrus-imapd/ctl_cyrusdb -r"
service cyrus-imapd start

It is unclear to me what if anything is lost by doing the above.
Anyone know?

But is there a fix for this?  We are running 2.2.12-3.RHEL4.1 on a
CentOS4.1 x86_64 box

Is there a way to at least just make cyrus die instead of filling
up the log with the DBERROR messages.

This has happened twice today, and two other times in past 40 days.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Raines                email: raines at nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
MGH/MIT/HMS Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
149 (2301) 13th Street     Charlestown, MA 02129	    USA