Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Bron Gondwana
On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 07:47:31AM -0500, Nik Conwell wrote:
> 
> On Dec 30, 2008, at 4:43 PM, Shawn Nock wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > a scripted rename of mailboxes to balance partition utilization when  
> > we
> > add another partition.
> 
> Just curious - how do stop people from accessing their mailboxes  
> during the time they are being renamed and moved to another partition?

All access goes via an nginx proxy - we use the proc directory contents
to detect currently active connections and termintate them after
blocking all new logins in the authentication daemon.

Once they're fully moved, logins are enabled again.

Bron.

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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Shawn Nock
Nik Conwell wrote:
> 
> On Dec 30, 2008, at 4:43 PM, Shawn Nock wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> a scripted rename of mailboxes to balance partition utilization when we
>> add another partition.
> 
> Just curious - how do stop people from accessing their mailboxes during
> the time they are being renamed and moved to another partition?
> 

We don't really bother. We run the script overnight (over several
nights) to minimize storage utilization and we haven't run into a
problem. I haven't looked at the code in a while, but as I recall the
rename operation is fairly atomic.

In short: it doesn't take long to move a box. The worst thing that I
could imagine would be a momentary outage for a single user (``Mailbox
does not exist'' or similar). This sort of error (if it does occur in
the wild) would clear almost immediately.

Shawn

-- 
Shawn Nock (OpenPGP: 0xFF7D08A3)
Unix Systems Group; UITS
University of Arizona
nock at email.arizona.edu



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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread David Lang
On Wed, 31 Dec 2008, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-12-31 at 11:47 +0100, LALOT Dominique wrote:
>> Thanks for everybody. That was an interesting thread. Nobody seems to
>> use a NetApp appliance, may be due to NFS architecture problems.
>
> Personally, I'd never use NFS for anything.  Over the years I've had way
> to many NFS related problems on other things to ever want to try it
> again.

NFS has some very interesting capabilities and limitations. it's really bad for 
multiple processes writing to the same file (the cyrus* files for example) and 
for atomic actions (writing the message files for example)

there are ways that you can configure it that will work, but unless you already 
have a big NFS server you are probably much better off using a mechanism that 
makes the drives look more like local drives (SAN, iSCSI, etc) or try one of 
the 
cluster filesystems that has different tradeoffs than NFS does

>> I believe I'll look to ext4 that seemed to be available in last
>> kernel, and also to Solaris, but we are not enough to support another
>> OS.
>
> We've used Cyrus on XFS for almost a years, no problems.
>
> In regards to ext3 I'd pay attention to the vintage of problem reports
> and performance issues;  ext3 of several years ago is not the ext3 of
> today, many improvements have been made.  "data=writeback" mode can help
> performance quite a bit, as well as enabling "dir_index" if it isn't
> already (did it ever become the default?).  The periodic fsck can also
> be disabled via tune2fs.   I only point this out since, if you already
> have any ext3 setup,  trying the above are all painless and might buy
> you something.

it's definantly worth testing different filesystems. I last did a test about 
two 
years ago and confirmed XFS as my choice. I have one instance of cyrus still 
running on ext3 and I definantly see it as a user in the performance.

David Lang

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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Scott Likens
Ah the saga of Hans Reiser.  That unfortunately is the Downfall of  
Reiserfs.

Yes, his company has disappeared, and a "void" has appeared from his  
lack of presence?

However, the Reiserfs4 patch set is current against the linux kernel  
2.6.28 (see 
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/edward/reiser4/reiser4-for-2.6/)

However I think that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiser4) pretty  
much sums up the future of Reiserfs4.

... However I haven't really run into show stopping bugs on Reiserfs3  
in quite some time (with excellent hardware).  However you replace it  
with dodgy hardware and things change.

I haven't looked at btrfs yet with Cyrus, perhaps I'll do that  
sometime soon.


On Dec 31, 2008, at 6:20 AM, Janne Peltonen wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 04:58:57AM -0800, Scott Likens wrote:
>> I would not discount using reiserfs (v3) by any means.  It's still  
>> by far a
>> better choice for a filesystem with Cyrus then Ext3 or Ext4.  I  
>> haven't really
>> seen anyone do any tests with Ext4, but I imagine it should be  
>> about par for
>> the course for Ext3.
>
> There are /lots/ of (comparative) tests done: The most recent I could
> find with a quick Google is here:
>
>  http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ext4_benchmarks
>
> The problem with reiserfs is... well. The developers have explicitely
> stated that the development of v3 has come to its end, and there was  
> the
> long argument between Hans Reiser and kernel delevopers about  
> whether v4
> could be included in kernel. When Hans Reiser was charged with murder
> (not the crow or Cyrus variant), his company assured that the
> development (of v4) would continue, but the last time I tried to find
> out anything about the project, it appeared more or less dead. Of
> course, the current reiserfs (v3) is very stable, but if you run into
> any issues, there really isn't a developer you can contact (or send
> patches to, if you figure out the bug).
>
>
> --Janne
> -- 
> Janne Peltonen  PGP Key ID: 0x9CFAC88B
> Please consider membership of the Hospitality Club 
> (http://www.hospitalityclub.org 
> )
>
>
> !DSPAM:495b87d570801804284693!
>
>


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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Adam Tauno Williams
On Wed, 2008-12-31 at 15:46 +0200, Janne Peltonen wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 07:38:21AM -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > In regards to ext3 I'd pay attention to the vintage of problem reports
> > and performance issues;  ext3 of several years ago is not the ext3 of
> > today, many improvements have been made.  "data=writeback" mode can help
> > performance quite a bit, as well as enabling "dir_index" if it isn't
> > already (did it ever become the default?).  The periodic fsck can also
> > be disabled via tune2fs.   I only point this out since, if you already
> > have any ext3 setup,  trying the above are all painless and might buy
> > you something.
> I wouldn't call data=writeback painless. I had it on in the testing phase
> of our current Cyrus installation, and if the filesystem had to be
> forcibly unmounted by any reason (yes, there are reasons), the amount of
> corruption in those files that happened to be active during the unmount
> - well, it wasn't a nice sight. And the files weren't recoverable,
> except from backup.
> I never really got the point of the data=writeback mode. Sure, it
> increases throughput, but so does disabling the journal completely, and
> seems to me the end result as concerns data integrity is exactly the
> same.

The *filesystem* is recoverable as the meta-data is journaled.
*Contents* of files may be lost/corrupted.  I'm fine with that since a
serious abend usually leaves the state of the data in a questionable
state anyway for reasons other than the filesystem;  I want something I
can safely (and quickly) remount and investigate/restore.  It is a
trade-off.


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Re: Basic question

2008-12-31 Thread Dan White
Jason Voorhees wrote:
> Hi there:
>
> I'm planning to use Cyrus IMAP and OpenLDAP to authenticate users.
> Long time ago I used to configure Cyrus IMAP + Cyrus SASL using
> saslauthd with pam module. It was something simple.
>
> Then I used to configure Cyrus IMAP + Cyrus SASL using saslauthd with
> ldap module and /etc/saslauthd.conf without problems. That's fine.
>
>
> Now I would like to use Cyrus IMAP with OpenLDAP too, but I found that
> there are at least 2 ways:
>
> 1. Use Cyrus SASL with auxprop to authenticate users trough LDAP using
> auxprop_plugin: ldapdb, sasl_ldap_servers among other sasl_* directives.
> Right?
>
> 2. The other way is to use ldap_* directives like ldap_uri, ldap_filter
> among others. But I believe that I would need to use 'pts' module in
> auth_mech directive, right?
>
> The question is: What are pts, unix, krb and krb5 modules used for?
> What's the difference between them? Should I use pts module to make
> Cyrus talk directly to OpenLDAP...? Or should I use Cyrus SASL with
> auxprop plugin to make the authentication to OpenLDAP?
>
> Is there a place where I can get some clear information about these
> items? Man pages are not too clear :S
>
> Thanks people :)
>   

Jason,

Available documentation that I'm aware of includes:

/doc/options.html (within the cyrus-sasl source) which documents how to 
configure the ldapdb auxprop plugin

/saslauthd/LDAP_SASLAUTHD (within the cyrus-sasl source) which discusses 
how to configure the ldap saslauthd backend

/doc/overview.html (within the cyrus-imap source), in the 'Kerberos vs. 
Unix Authorization' section, which discusses authorization.

As I understand it, the ldapdb auxprop plugin is entirely within the 
realm of cyrus sasl (authentication), and the auth_mech directive in 
imapd.conf is cyrus imapd specific, and only handles authorization.

The auth_mech options (pts, unix, krb and krb5) direct how cyrus imapd 
authorizes users to access mailboxes/resources *after* they have been 
authenticated. The kerberos options direct imapd to perform some 
canonicalization of the authenticating user before opening their mailbox 
- so if a user connects as jsm...@example.com, the kerberos options 
could canonicalize that to 'jsmith', so that the server can open the 
'jsmith' mailbox instead of searching for a 'jsm...@example.com' mailbox.

The unix and pts options should only come in to play if you have 
specified a 'group:staff' style ACL for your mailboxes. It tells the 
imapd server how to resolve group membership to grant access to the 
mailbox. The 'unix' option will perform a unix getgrent call, or 
something like that, to determine if a user belongs to a group - using 
nss for instance, which in turn can use the nss-ldap or nss-mysql 
modules to lookup groups. However, that's pretty slow in my experience 
and you'd need to make sure you're properly optimizing your LDAP database.

The pts route can be used to reference and LDAP server directly to 
resolve group membership within an LDAP database.

- Dan

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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Janne Peltonen
On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 04:58:57AM -0800, Scott Likens wrote:
> I would not discount using reiserfs (v3) by any means.  It's still by far a
> better choice for a filesystem with Cyrus then Ext3 or Ext4.  I haven't really
> seen anyone do any tests with Ext4, but I imagine it should be about par for
> the course for Ext3.

There are /lots/ of (comparative) tests done: The most recent I could
find with a quick Google is here:

  http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ext4_benchmarks

The problem with reiserfs is... well. The developers have explicitely
stated that the development of v3 has come to its end, and there was the
long argument between Hans Reiser and kernel delevopers about whether v4
could be included in kernel. When Hans Reiser was charged with murder
(not the crow or Cyrus variant), his company assured that the
development (of v4) would continue, but the last time I tried to find
out anything about the project, it appeared more or less dead. Of
course, the current reiserfs (v3) is very stable, but if you run into
any issues, there really isn't a developer you can contact (or send
patches to, if you figure out the bug).


--Janne
-- 
Janne Peltonen  PGP Key ID: 0x9CFAC88B
Please consider membership of the Hospitality Club 
(http://www.hospitalityclub.org)

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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread <::.. Teresa_II ..::>
У вт, 2008-12-30 у 17:49 +0100, LALOT Dominique пише:

> Once, there was a bad shutdown corrupting ext3fs and we spent 6 hours
> on an fsck.

Actually i do use reiserfs over 2 years on cyrus-imapd. It performs
great even with realy big count of files in imap spool folders. But i
dont know how it will perform on EMC.

4 years ago i tryied ext3. It was disaster. Slow as hell.

Reiser4 was once used too, it did even better than reiserfs. But after 2
mounth stable running it get kernel OPS because a FS. And i did swiched
back to reiserfs.

-- 
Teresa



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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Janne Peltonen
On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 07:38:21AM -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> In regards to ext3 I'd pay attention to the vintage of problem reports
> and performance issues;  ext3 of several years ago is not the ext3 of
> today, many improvements have been made.  "data=writeback" mode can help
> performance quite a bit, as well as enabling "dir_index" if it isn't
> already (did it ever become the default?).  The periodic fsck can also
> be disabled via tune2fs.   I only point this out since, if you already
> have any ext3 setup,  trying the above are all painless and might buy
> you something.

I wouldn't call data=writeback painless. I had it on in the testing phase
of our current Cyrus installation, and if the filesystem had to be
forcibly unmounted by any reason (yes, there are reasons), the amount of
corruption in those files that happened to be active during the unmount
- well, it wasn't a nice sight. And the files weren't recoverable,
except from backup.

I never really got the point of the data=writeback mode. Sure, it
increases throughput, but so does disabling the journal completely, and
seems to me the end result as concerns data integrity is exactly the
same.


--Janne
-- 
Janne Peltonen  PGP Key ID: 0x9CFAC88B
Please consider membership of the Hospitality Club 
(http://www.hospitalityclub.org)

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cyrus-sasl pam mysql connections are not getting closed

2008-12-31 Thread ram
I am using cyrus-sasl with pam mysql ( on Centos5)

The mysql is on a remote server. After some time I find that there are
too many connections to mysql open ( using netstat)

I restart saslauthd but still these dont away 
How do I check what the mysql connection is being used for ? and how do
I avoid these piling up 





Thanks
Ram








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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Eric Luyten
> -- Nik Conwell  is rumored to have mumbled on 31. Dezember 2008 
> 07:47:31 -0500 regarding Re: choosing a file system:
> 
> > Just curious - how do stop people from accessing their mailboxes
> > during the time they are being renamed and moved to another partition?

I moved a few thousand mailboxes in a similar fashion (summer of 2007) and 
encountered no problems. New message deliveries were nicely "frozen" by
Cyrus while the target Inbox was being renamed/moved.

 

Question : would it, stabilitywise, make a difference if the mail data and 
metadata 
are split, allocating the metadata partitions on SAN-based LUNs and storing 
messages 
in NAS (NFS) space ?

In other words : are the Cyrus-over-NFS inconveniences confined to the cyrus.* 
files ?


Rationale : 
  NAS space can, typically, be "grown" more easily than SAN space.
  This could be an advantage to older server OSes en filesystems...


Eric Luyten, Brussels Free University Computing Centre (Cyrus 2.2, 58k users, 
2.3 TB)

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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Sebastian Hagedorn
-- Nik Conwell  is rumored to have mumbled on 31. Dezember 2008 
07:47:31 -0500 regarding Re: choosing a file system:



Just curious - how do stop people from accessing their mailboxes
during the time they are being renamed and moved to another partition?


I just do a grep on the username in the proc directory - if there is no 
process for that user, I figure it's safe enough to move the mailbox. This 
approach has worked well so far. I experimented with accessing a mailbox 
while it was being moved and that seemed to be OK as well, i.e. it failed 
while the operation was in progress.

--
Sebastian Hagedorn - RZKR-R1 (Flachbau), Zi. 18, Robert-Koch-Str. 10
Zentrum für angewandte Informatik - Universitätsweiter Service RRZK
Universität zu Köln / Cologne University - Tel. +49-221-478-5587

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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Scott Likens

Hi,

I would not discount using reiserfs (v3) by any means.  It's still by  
far a better choice for a filesystem with Cyrus then Ext3 or Ext4.  I  
haven't really seen anyone do any tests with Ext4, but I imagine it  
should be about par for the course for Ext3.


as far as the NFS... NFS isn't itself that bad, it's just that people  
tend to find ways to use NFS in a incorrect manner that only ends up  
leading to failure.


Scott

On Dec 31, 2008, at 2:47 AM, LALOT Dominique wrote:

Thanks for everybody. That was an interesting thread. Nobody seems  
to use a NetApp appliance, may be due to NFS architecture problems.


I believe I'll look to ext4 that seemed to be available in last  
kernel, and also to Solaris, but we are not enough to support  
another OS.


Dom

And Happy New Year !

2008/12/31 Bron Gondwana 
On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 02:43:14PM -0700, Shawn Nock wrote:
> Bron and the fastmail guys could tell you more about reiserfs...  
we've

> used RH&SuSE/reiserfs/EMC for quite a while and we are very happy.

Yeah, sure could :)

You can probably find plenty of stuff from me in the archives about  
our

setup - the basic things are:

* separate metadata on RAID1 10kRPM (or 15kRPM in the new boxes)  
drives.
* data files on RAID5 big slow drives - data IO isn't a limiting  
factor

* 300Gb "slots" with 15Gb associated meta drives, like this:

/dev/sdb6 14016208   8080360   5935848  58% /mnt/meta6
/dev/sdb7 14016208   8064848   5951360  58% /mnt/meta7
/dev/sdb8 14016208   8498812   5517396  61% /mnt/meta8
/dev/sdd2292959500 248086796  44872704  85% /mnt/data6
/dev/sdd3292959500 242722420  50237080  83% /mnt/data7
/dev/sdd4292959500 248840432  44119068  85% /mnt/data8

as you can see, that balances out pretty nicely.  We also store
per-user bayes databases on the associated meta drives.

We balance our disk usage by moving users between stores when usage
reaches 88% on any partition.  We get emailed if it goes above 92%
and paged if it goes above 95%.

Replication.  We have multiple "slots" on each server, and since
they are all the same size, we have replication pairs spread pretty
randomly around the hosts, so the failure of any one drive unit
(SCSI attached SATA) or imap server doesn't significantly overload
any one other machine.  By using Cyrus replication rather than,
say, DRBD, a filesystem corruption should only affect a single
partition, which won't take so long to fsck.

Moving users is easy - we run a sync_server on the Cyrus master, and
just create a custom config directory with symlinks into the tree on
the real server and a rewritten piece of mailboxes.db so we can
rename them during the move if needed.  It's all automatic.

We also have a "CheckReplication" perl module that can be used to
compare two ends to make sure everything is the same.  It does full
per-message flags checks, random sha1 integrity checks, etc.
Does require a custom patch to expose the GUID (as DIGEST.SHA1)
via IMAP.

I lost an entire drive unit on the 26th.  It stopped responding.
8 x 1TB drives in it.

I tried rebooting everything, then switched the affected stores over
to their replicas.  Total downtime for those users of about 15
minutes because I tried the reboot first just in case (there's a
chance that some messages were delivered and not yet replicated,
so it's better not to bring up the replica uncleanly until you're
sure there's no other choice)

In the end I decided that it wasn't recoverable quickly enough to
be viable, so chose new replica pairs for the slots that had been
on that drive unit (we keep some empty space on our machines for
just this eventuality) and started up another handy little script
"sync_all_users" which runs sync_client -u for every user, then
starts the rolling sync_client again at the end.  It took about
16 hours to bring everything back to fully replicated again.

Bron.



--
Dominique LALOT
Ingénieur Systèmes et Réseaux
http://annuaire.univmed.fr/showuser?uid=lalot
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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Nik Conwell

On Dec 30, 2008, at 4:43 PM, Shawn Nock wrote:

[...]

> a scripted rename of mailboxes to balance partition utilization when  
> we
> add another partition.

Just curious - how do stop people from accessing their mailboxes  
during the time they are being renamed and moved to another partition?

-nik

Information Technology
Systems Programming
Boston University


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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread Adam Tauno Williams
On Wed, 2008-12-31 at 11:47 +0100, LALOT Dominique wrote:
> Thanks for everybody. That was an interesting thread. Nobody seems to
> use a NetApp appliance, may be due to NFS architecture problems.

Personally, I'd never use NFS for anything.  Over the years I've had way
to many NFS related problems on other things to ever want to try it
again.

> I believe I'll look to ext4 that seemed to be available in last
> kernel, and also to Solaris, but we are not enough to support another
> OS.

We've used Cyrus on XFS for almost a years, no problems.  

In regards to ext3 I'd pay attention to the vintage of problem reports
and performance issues;  ext3 of several years ago is not the ext3 of
today, many improvements have been made.  "data=writeback" mode can help
performance quite a bit, as well as enabling "dir_index" if it isn't
already (did it ever become the default?).  The periodic fsck can also
be disabled via tune2fs.   I only point this out since, if you already
have any ext3 setup,  trying the above are all painless and might buy
you something.


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Re: choosing a file system

2008-12-31 Thread LALOT Dominique
Thanks for everybody. That was an interesting thread. Nobody seems to use a
NetApp appliance, may be due to NFS architecture problems.

I believe I'll look to ext4 that seemed to be available in last kernel, and
also to Solaris, but we are not enough to support another OS.

Dom

And Happy New Year !

2008/12/31 Bron Gondwana 

> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 02:43:14PM -0700, Shawn Nock wrote:
> > Bron and the fastmail guys could tell you more about reiserfs... we've
> > used RH&SuSE/reiserfs/EMC for quite a while and we are very happy.
>
> Yeah, sure could :)
>
> You can probably find plenty of stuff from me in the archives about our
> setup - the basic things are:
>
> * separate metadata on RAID1 10kRPM (or 15kRPM in the new boxes) drives.
> * data files on RAID5 big slow drives - data IO isn't a limiting factor
> * 300Gb "slots" with 15Gb associated meta drives, like this:
>
> /dev/sdb6 14016208   8080360   5935848  58% /mnt/meta6
> /dev/sdb7 14016208   8064848   5951360  58% /mnt/meta7
> /dev/sdb8 14016208   8498812   5517396  61% /mnt/meta8
> /dev/sdd2292959500 248086796  44872704  85% /mnt/data6
> /dev/sdd3292959500 242722420  50237080  83% /mnt/data7
> /dev/sdd4292959500 248840432  44119068  85% /mnt/data8
>
> as you can see, that balances out pretty nicely.  We also store
> per-user bayes databases on the associated meta drives.
>
> We balance our disk usage by moving users between stores when usage
> reaches 88% on any partition.  We get emailed if it goes above 92%
> and paged if it goes above 95%.
>
> Replication.  We have multiple "slots" on each server, and since
> they are all the same size, we have replication pairs spread pretty
> randomly around the hosts, so the failure of any one drive unit
> (SCSI attached SATA) or imap server doesn't significantly overload
> any one other machine.  By using Cyrus replication rather than,
> say, DRBD, a filesystem corruption should only affect a single
> partition, which won't take so long to fsck.
>
> Moving users is easy - we run a sync_server on the Cyrus master, and
> just create a custom config directory with symlinks into the tree on
> the real server and a rewritten piece of mailboxes.db so we can
> rename them during the move if needed.  It's all automatic.
>
> We also have a "CheckReplication" perl module that can be used to
> compare two ends to make sure everything is the same.  It does full
> per-message flags checks, random sha1 integrity checks, etc.
> Does require a custom patch to expose the GUID (as DIGEST.SHA1)
> via IMAP.
>
> I lost an entire drive unit on the 26th.  It stopped responding.
> 8 x 1TB drives in it.
>
> I tried rebooting everything, then switched the affected stores over
> to their replicas.  Total downtime for those users of about 15
> minutes because I tried the reboot first just in case (there's a
> chance that some messages were delivered and not yet replicated,
> so it's better not to bring up the replica uncleanly until you're
> sure there's no other choice)
>
> In the end I decided that it wasn't recoverable quickly enough to
> be viable, so chose new replica pairs for the slots that had been
> on that drive unit (we keep some empty space on our machines for
> just this eventuality) and started up another handy little script
> "sync_all_users" which runs sync_client -u for every user, then
> starts the rolling sync_client again at the end.  It took about
> 16 hours to bring everything back to fully replicated again.
>
> Bron.
>



-- 
Dominique LALOT
Ingénieur Systèmes et Réseaux
http://annuaire.univmed.fr/showuser?uid=lalot

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