Outlook 2003 still crashing

[Daniel Eckl]

Hi Wil!

I use the binary packages from SuSE 10.0 (because I'm too lazy to keep 
up with security patches by myself *g*)

It's very likely that I use options which are not supported by my cyrus 
version at all and it just ignores them. I googled the net and studied 
all mailing lists and how-tos and man pages and added everything which I 
assumed to be good. I easily might have hit a page referring to a newer 
  and/or patched version I don't have.

For myself I run linux on my workstation for many reasons, but I didn't 
have any stalls with outlook myself before switching to linux and all 
our users who use Outlook (about 250 approx) don't report problems like 
this one.

We just have three known problems with outlook which all are absolutely 
client side:

1. when the pst archive outlook uses for caching opened imap objects 
goes up to 2GB, outlook goes mad (like not showing new imap objects in 
inbox). For this caching pst files one cannot use the newer pst file 
format which comes with outlook 2003 which overcomes this limitation; 
for cache pst it chooses old format automatically and unchangeable.
Solution is to stop outlook, delete the cache pst and start outlook 
again (resulting in new fetching all headers for every folder you select 
:cry:)

2. sent items can not be stored on the server reliable. Local outlook 
rules which do this just disappear from time to time. Dunno why... Could 
be users fault, too, no clue here.

3. Under unknown circumstances, a client seems to put incredible IO load 
on the server for 5 minutes up to 30 minutes. With my actual setup 
(thanks to XFS), the server just handles this stress, but the problem is 
still there. I just can assume that this has to be an outlook client, 
because they are used the most. I might be wrong here, too. No clue either.

Best,
Daniel

Wil Cooley schrieb:
> On Tue, 2006-08-15 at 14:16 +0200, Daniel Eckl wrote:
>> I understand. No, we don't have this either.
> 
> Curious; as the original initiator of the thread way back, I still see
> frequent stalls on Outlook 2003; they're definitely Outlook stalls
> too--the Cyrus server is not busy.  In fact, it's an installation on my
> workstation, so I'm the only user.  Ultimately, I gave up trying to
> stick with the organizational standard and installed Linux on my desktop
> (which I'd have preferred in the first place) and moved Windows into
> VMware.
> 
> I set 'imapidlepoll: 0' in my imapd.conf, which is supposed to disable
> IDLE altogether, according to the man page, to no avail.  I also
> disabled idled in cyrus.conf, likewise to no avail.  I did not, however,
> recompile Cyrus to disable IMAP, which might be what Ken meant back
> then.  I'm using the Fedora Extras RPMs, which are based on Simon
> Matter's; it's possible, I guess, that a patch is also causing a
> problem.  Daniel, did you compile yours directly or is this a binary
> from SUSE?  It seems like you have a few patches too, since some of that
> options aren't documented in my imapd.conf.
> 
>> I have attached cyrus.conf and imapd.conf.
>>
>> We are running Cyrus 2.2.12 on SuSE 10.0 on filesystem XFS
>> (HW: Dual Xeon 2GB RAM, SCSI RAID-5 0,5 TB capacity)
>>
>> I had freezes up to 30 seconds with the same config running on
>> filesystem ext3, but this error was clearly on server side, the ext3
>> flushing behavior was so bad that it caused incredible iowait and huge
>> load and full server stalls.
> 
> Not that it matters now since you've switched, but you were probably
> suffering from an undersized journal, see:
> 
> http://nakedape.cc/wiki/PlatformNotes_2fLinuxNotes
> 
> Wil