"invalid mailbox format" with upgrade to 2.3.3

[Scott Russell]

Andreas Hasenack wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 09:16:48AM +0100, Nicolas KOWALSKI wrote:
>>> I remember seeing a similar problem someone had with an upgrade to
>>> 2.3.x in this list but I can't find it in the archives (or I'm
>>> mistaken).
>> I had this problem. 
>>
>> I also had to reconstruct to make 2.3.x happy. It was probably because
>> some mailboxes had some garbage in them; for example, the cyrus.index
>> size of a mailbox triggering this error changed (shrank) after the
>> reconstruct.
> 
> I don't know if I had garbage in those files. But if I had, it was in
> all mailboxes, not just a few.
> 
> I once upgraded such a system from 2.2.12 to 2.3.1 and I didn't
> have this problem then. Actually, the whole story is a bit more bizarre.
> This system had the following upgrade path:
> 
> 2.2.12 -> 2.3.1 -> 2.2.12 (yes, back to 2.2.12) -> 2.3.3
> 
> I only had this problem in the last step (2.2.12 -> 2.3.3).

I did my 2.1.16 to 2.3.1 update last week and it went smooth. I was 
expecting the worse considering the reports of mailbox corruption have 
read. When moving files over I did the following:

1) Used rsync to get the files to the new system then
    set perms in /var/spool/imap as needed.
2) Moved sieve, quota and seen dbs over, also set perms as needed
3) Only moved the mailboxes.db file and let cyrus recreate anything else
4) After first startup, before letting users login, I did the following:
    a) run quota -f to check/fix all quotas
    b) loop through all accts with a perl script
       to login, read 3 headers from inbox, then log out.
5) Send email to all accts with update information.
6) Allowed for normal account logins.

The whole process went very smooth and I never saw an issue with mailbox 
corruption in the logs while doing test logins or sending the email 
notification that the update was complete. I received no reports of
missing mail or problems with seen flags.

Maybe for me I was lucky because I skipped 2.2.x completely :)

-- 
Scott Russell <lnxgeek at us.ibm.com>
IBM Linux Technology Center System Admin