Beware the unified Cyrus server

[Gary Mills]

On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 06:36:12PM -0600, Gary Mills wrote:
> If you have:
> 1) An existing conventional IMAP server, and
> 2) convert it to a unified murder configuration, with
> 3) a mupdate slave, and without
> 4) a mupdatepush entry in cyrus.conf,
> it will delete all of the local mailboxes from the mailboxes database.

> This seems like very dangerous behavior to me, even though it can be
> avoided by adding the mupdatepush entry in cyrus.conf.  How can the
> mupdate slave be modified to make it safer?

On reflection, I'm convinced that the mupdate slave should not be
doing this.  In a conventional murder, with discrete frontend and
backend servers, it's reasonable to have mailboxes on the backend that
are not known to the mupdate master.  This is a temporary condition,
of course.  The same thing should be permitted in a unified murder.
The mupdate slave should be modified to avoid deleting local mailboxes
in a unified configuration.

There's a similar, but less serious, problem when `ctl_mboxlist -m' is
run on a unified server: it deletes all of the remote mailboxes from
the local mailboxes database.  These are restored when the mupdate
slave starts up.  Again, `ctl_mboxlist -m' should not be doing this
in a unified configuration.  It might be reasonable for a backend
server, although in that case the remote mailboxes should never be
in the local mailboxes database.

-- 
-Gary Mills-    -Unix Support-    -U of M Academic Computing and Networking-