DBERROR: skiplist recovery mailboxes.db 0090 - suddenly all is failing!

[Gregor Wenkelewsky]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:15:53 +0100, Andrew Morgan <morgan at orst.edu> wrote:

>> Cyrus has been installed here just a few weeks ago, and after some hard
>> days it was working smoothly and very well. Until suddenly, sadly today
>> it started to fail completely with this error message in mail.warn,
>> mail.error and syslog:
>>
>> cyrus/imap[..]: DBERROR: skiplist recovery /var/lib/cyrus/mailboxes.db: 0090 should be ADD or DELETE
>> cyrus/imap[..]: DBERROR: opening /var/lib/cyrus/mailboxes.db: cyrusdb error
>
> You'll need to fix the corruption of the mailboxes.db file.  It is a
> skiplist format file in your case, so do a google search for
> "skiplist.py".  You'll find a python utility that can do some better
> recovery than the cyrus tools.  The example is for cyrus seen-state files,
> but the same should work on the mailboxes.db as well.

Fine, I succeeded with that! Did check the auto backup files before too,
but they were all identical. It was too late probably. Then I used the
skiplist.py from here: http://oss.netfarm.it/python-cyrus.php

python ~/skiplist.py mailboxes.db >mailboxes.txt
rn mailboxes.db mailboxes.err
cvt_cyrusdb /var/lib/cyrus/mailboxes.txt flat /var/lib/cyrus/mailboxes.db skiplist
chown cyrus mailboxes.db

Fixed!

Okay then, now it works, but how often will an error like this occur, can
I do something to prevent it? First I thought of "0090" as some sort of
error code, and I found only two error incidents with /line/ 0090 in
Google... ;) ...but it is much more numerous.

Can this be related to shutting down and rebooting the system? Could be a
coincidence of course, but just after rebooting the error was there.

Can it be related to Squatter? By default, Squatter was not set, but some
days before the error I set Squatter to an hourly "nice" run. Now I turned
it off again.

> You should also setup a cronjob to dump the mailboxes.db file to plaintext
> periodically (so it can be backed up).  Something like this works here:
>
> 58 * * * * cyrus /usr/local/cyrus/bin/ctl_mboxlist -d > /var/spool/cyrus/config/mailboxes.db.dump

Yes, I'll do that, though it's more like holding ready the plaster instead
of preventing the injury.

This has to be written to /etc/crontab like Squatter, correct? How often
should it be running? Maybe it's only neccessary when new IMAP users and/or
folders have been created??

Thank you for all help!

I feel queasy with an error that has no apparent reason. I wanted to
build a system that can run without administration for months and, maybe,
would sustain even a rare power failure. But there was no power failure
and no sign of a disc error either... :-(

Kind regards,
Gregor