Hi Ricardo, I appreciate your candid response regarding the support limitations. I fully understand that we are operating outside the "standard" environment and that the project cannot be expected to provide fixes for issues arising from such setups.
My interest, however, remains purely architectural. Even if the project doesn't officially sanction it, I am interested in your technical perspective on whether modern strategies effectively address the historical problems: Separation of Concerns: By keeping Cyrus metadata (indexes/headers) on local NVMe/SSD storage and only offloading bulk data (message bodies/attachments) to NFS, does that mitigate the primary locking/concurrency dangers you usually see? Access Control: If we use a mail proxy to ensure that each mailbox is accessed by only one server instance at a time, does this resolve the concurrency conflicts that typically make NFS problematic for Cyrus? I am trying to determine if these strategies render the "NFS is harmful" warning effectively obsolete from a purely functional standpoint, even if it remains unsupported. Best, Seif-----Option 3: Concise and Collaborative (Best if you want to keep the conversation brief) Subject: Re: "NFS is Harmful" is it a myth outdated Hi Ricardo, Thanks for the reply. I completely respect the "use at your own risk" policy—that is perfectly fair. My curiosity is mainly regarding the technical "why." I'd be interested to know if, in your view, architecture-level solutions like metadata separation (local disks) or using a mail proxy to manage concurrency actually resolve the underlying hazards, or if NFS remains fundamentally incompatible with Cyrus regardless of these safety measures. Thanks again for your time. Best regards, Seif On Wed, 16 Sept 2026, 21:26 Ricardo Signes via Info, < [email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 4, 2026, at 06:18, [email protected] wrote: > > 1. Does this recommendation apply to high-performance enterprise storage > systems (such as NetApp or Hitachi) operating in an active/passive > architecture with a mail proxy directing requests to a single Cyrus server > to prevent concurrent mailbox access? > > 2. Does the restriction apply to all data types, or specifically to > metadata (e.g., headers and indexes)? Would it be supported to store > metadata on local disks while hosting email bodies and attachments on a NAS > via NFS? > > > The page you cited is pretty old, and probably could use with revisiting. > But you're asking, here, "Okay, but can I use NAS now?" > > I don't know. Obviously, the technology gets better over time. It might > be tolerable. > > I would not attempt it. Cyrus assumes it's got a real filesystem, with > the normal unix filesystem behaviors. Clever simulations of those > behaviors may or may not work. More to the point, they might not work, we > don't know whether they'd work, and if you said "They don't work", we would > probably not do anything to make them work. > > -- > rjbs > > *Cyrus <https://cyrus.topicbox.com/latest>* / Info / see discussions > <https://cyrus.topicbox.com/groups/info> + participants > <https://cyrus.topicbox.com/groups/info/members> + delivery options > <https://cyrus.topicbox.com/groups/info/subscription> Permalink > <https://cyrus.topicbox.com/groups/info/Tcf711fc6f0ce8498-M2c61c742db277a18854c8de8> > ------------------------------------------ Cyrus: Info Permalink: https://cyrus.topicbox.com/groups/info/Tcf711fc6f0ce8498-M0c2faabaaa1497950495a5e5 Delivery options: https://cyrus.topicbox.com/groups/info/subscription
