Solved: Re: Help please, cyrus imapd production system down

[Mike Eggleston]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Andrew Morgan might have said:

> On Wed, 26 Mar 2008, Mike Eggleston wrote:
> 
> >It looks like there is just one user that when that user connects to
> >cyrus the imapd starts coring and when a message is sent to that user's
> >address then lmtpd starts coring. How do I find out what is wrong the
> >user's account and why these processes are coring?
> 
> In my experience, this can happen when a user has a corrupted seen file. 
> Locate the user's seen file and remove it.
> 
> 	Andy

Thank you. I removed the user's seen file and everything started working
normally. Any idea why this file got corrupted, how to recover from the
corruption other than deleting the file (/var/lib/imap/user/?/$USER.seen),
and how to keep the corruption from happening again. This file was
corrupted at my site in the middle of the night (sometime after 23:19
local). The user was not actively using IMAP, but the user was still
logged into a workstation and had M$ Outlook running.

Problem symptoms:
lmtpd cored receiving email
imapd cored when the user connected
lots of messages in /var/log/maillog referring to:
  master[2438]: process 2482 exited, signaled to death by 7
higher than normal system load

Problem solution:
remove the user's seen file at /var/lib/imap/user/?/$USER.seen
  no restarting of cyrus required after removing the broken file

Environment:
Fedora Core 5 (current patches)
# rpm -qa | grep cyrus
cyrus-imapd-devel-2.3.1-2.8.fc5
cyrus-sasl-lib-2.1.21-10
cyrus-sasl-2.1.21-10
cyrus-imapd-utils-2.3.1-2.8.fc5
cyrus-sasl-ldap-2.1.21-10
cyrus-imapd-2.3.1-2.8.fc5
cyrus-sasl-devel-2.1.21-10

Mike