Cyrus DB Errors "DBERROR: error fetching user.username" even after reconstructs

[Josh Whitver]

Hello all,

I've got one user on my mail system that Cyrus seems to have it in  
for.  IMAP connections stall out, mail messages to her get stuck in  
the Postfix queue indefinitely, and things just generally aren't  
working for her.  Server is an Intel Xserve running Mac OS X 10.5.5  
Server, clients are 10.5.4 using Mail.app (but issues appear using any  
IMAP client, such as our RoundCube webmail system).  All other users  
(more than 500 of them) are fine.

Whenever an IMAP connection is attempted, I see this in the log:
Feb 10 09:14:17 urbandale imap[34508]: DBERROR: error fetching user. 
[username]: cyrusdb error

We've seen this kind of issue before, and usually doing the following  
clears it up:
sudo /usr/bin/cyrus/bin/reconstruct -r -f user/[username]

Under Tiger Server, you had to be sure to use sudo -u cyrusimap so  
that the cyrus files would have the correct permissions, but under  
Leopard, running it as root seems to do the job (the cyrus files are  
owned by _cyrus afterwards, like they should be).

At any rate, that didn't solve her issues, so I ended up deleting the  
cyrus.* files in all her mail boxes and her Inbox and running it  
again, creating fresh copies.  Still no dice.  So then I tried:
sudo /usr/bin/cyrus/bin/reconstruct -x -r user/[username]

Which again created fresh files, but the issues still persist.  I  
backed up the user's mailboxes and went into cyradm and deleted them  
altogether, and re-created them.  I didn't move any of the mail  
messages back because I wanted to see if it would work with a blank  
slate.  Same issue.

This seems to imply that something's borked in the main Cyrus  
database, if I'm not mistaken.  The question then becomes what to do  
about that.  Suggestions, anyone?  I'm rapidly running out of ideas -  
any help you can offer would be appreciated.  Thanks!
--
Josh Whitver
whitverj at urbandale.k12.ia.us / josh at whitver.net
Don't anthropomorphize computers.  They hate that.