are these error messages severe? and how to fix them?

[Alain Spineux]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 6:31 PM,  <mahecha at jsums.edu> wrote:
> greetings all.
>
> This morning a user called me saying that he was using reading his email
> (via squirrelmail) in one computer, then he logged out, and some time later
> went to another computer open squirrelmail, and his mail was gone....
>
> I checked directly in the mailstore and he had only a couple of messages,
> but he assures me that he did not delete anything....
>
> After some search on the log files, I found something like this:
>
> May 19 09:56:05 ccaix imaps[8619]: skiplist: recovered
> /var/lib/imap/user/C/user^name.seen (3 records, 7316 bytes) in 0 seconds
>
> after some more digging, Ifind that a bunch of account have the same type of
> "error" messages.

Is it always about the .seen file ? Or about a skiplist ?

>
> What do they mean? and how to fix them? are they serious?
>

- The .seen is an index that contains the state of emails, if you have
already read it or not.
- cyrreconstruct aka reconstruct is the tool to do the job, but it
looks like cyrus do it by itself !
- The .seen is only the .seen :-) This error is harmless, except if it
appears to often and
is the sign of something going wrong.


> I read some info and it says to delete the .seen and athen reconstruct the
> db for all users, but I'm not sure I want to do that for all the system.

Don't delete these files. Cyrus and cyrreconstruct are able to repair them!
If you still get a problem after a repair then you could try to delete
it, for a try,
but the you loose all your "mail status"

>
> Is there a way to do it for a single user (or a smal group of users).

Yes cyrreconstruct can work for one ore more user and also all user at once.

>
> Will cyrus delete emails during the process of recovering a user.seen file?
>

No

But the file that can be bring into play whe emailq are disappearing
is the .index file,
and a cyrreconstruct will repair it also.


As you can see, running this command ,
# man imapd.conf | col -b | grep _db
       annotation_db: skiplist
       duplicate_db: berkeley-nosync
       mboxkey_db: skiplist
       mboxlist_db: skiplist
       ptscache_db: berkeley
       quota_db: quotalegacy
       seenstate_db: skiplist
       subscription_db: flat
       tlscache_db: berkeley-nosync

cyrus use a lot of db with a lot of backend, some back-end are more or
less reliable than other,
depending the OS or the imap version. As a workaround it is possible
to change the backend.

> Currently using:
> Cent OS 4 x_64

If you look in previous post (1 year ago maybe)  theyr was post about
probleme in the "map" function that was generating problem with old kernel.
And a 64bits should not help.

Was your system working well in the past ?
Before to do something, be sure to have identified your problem.

> Cyrus POP3 v2.2.12-Invoca-RPM-2.2.12-8.1
> ESMTP Sendmail 8.13.1/8.13.1
>
> Thanks in advanced.
>
> Thanks
>
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>



-- 
Alain Spineux
aspineux gmail com
May the sources be with you