I have an environment using UW-Imap 2004g on multiple machines that share common mailboxes via a Sun QFS Shared file system mounting from SAN. These mbox formats work fine so far using .locking techniques.
I'm looking at converting to MBX or Mix format (finally!) and am doubtful that the flock implementation will work out of the box. In my testing, there have been some random corruption issues with MBX style boxes when I scatter usage among servers to the same mailbox. QFS supports both flock and fcntl locking (I'm on Solaris 10, so I guess it' s fcntl) but c-client is putting those inode exclusive lock files in /tmp. QFS also controls file access at the FS level so that only one client can write to a file at any given time unless I specifically specify multi-writer ability at mount time, which I'm not doing. QFS is a server-client model; a metadata server controls access and locking while data access is direct. I'm wondering if the separate servers not knowing about the /tmp.lockfiles is the reason for the corruption. It's mainly only noticeable when larger attachments are being delivered (snarfed). Are there any modifications I can do to share the location of these tmp lock files on one of my shared filesystems to ensure the flock'ing success on MBX/Mix formats between multiple servers? Will that help or hurt things? Am I just out of luck when it comes to exclusive locking and multiple servers? The current environment provides good redundancy and load balancing as it is now. I'd like to convert to newer mailbox formats to get better performance for larger mailboxes.
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