July 29, 2005
Courier… WTF?!
I noticed this error today:
Jul 29 00:54:50 light imaplogin: malloc: Input/output error
Note helpful lack of pid, so I had to strace all my imapds to track it down and then grep through source code for calls to perror (random guesswork). And it’s caused by… wait for it… famd not running (see #294656). Of course!
No, really. WTF?!?! I’m switching to dovecot. Utter utter crack.
Update: Corrected the bug number. #308313 is the other problem I’ve been debugging today, the combination of the two leading me to believe my machine was rooted or had f🤬d hardware. I utterly hate both courier *and* proftpd, and will be switching to dovecot and vsftpd as soon as possible.
6 responses to “Courier… WTF?!”
Leave a Reply
Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
Links
Archives
- April 2024
- February 2024
- March 2023
- November 2022
- May 2022
- February 2022
- June 2021
- January 2021
- August 2019
- October 2018
- July 2017
- May 2010
- October 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- March 2009
- January 2009
- July 2008
- June 2008
- April 2008
- May 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- June 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
- August 2005
- July 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
I used to run Courier too, but it’s too slow and has some tricky and hidden WTF like this. I switched to Dovecot about a couple of weeks ago (http://blog.bulix.org/index.php/blog/480 [fr]). Faster, harder, stronger ! ((c) DaftPunk ;p)
Absolutely! Speed was the other thing – I run Dovecot at home and the indexing is brilliant – addressing the only downside to Maildirs, which is that they take ages to load. I think we settled on Courier because it could read our virtual users from PostgreSQL, before this functionality was mature in Dovecot, but it’s there now and works fine.
This script looks exceedingly handy though. Have you considered having it added to Dovecot? Have you tested with clients other than mutt? Some like Evolution seem to get really confused if the IMAP folders change under them, especially the whole namespace like this…
Hmmm. I have a different experience with the whole courier suite. It just works as advertised, both the MTA and IMAP. I don’t think I had to change the configuration much, if at all. Very few WTF moments…
The only thing I agree with is that courier-IMAP is a bit slow. Other than that it was just plug&play. I can’t be bothered changing the LDAP structure just to add dovecot in the mix. Maybe if I move off courier-mta I’d consider it, but at the moment I’ve got few reasons. Which MTA are you using by the way?
The MTA we use is postfix, which lets you specify whatever queries you want to be the source of its lookup tables. I’ve never used courier as an MTA, but I’ve got no problems with postfix so I’m not keen to start trying other stuff (especially courier) now. We would’ve used dovecot originally but it wasn’t quite ready to do the database stuff at the time, but I’ve always known it to be far less crackful than courier (look at the respective sizes of the packages for a start? and since when did you need 30 processes to serve about 10 IMAP connections?).
Change the LDAP structure? You’ve touched on one of my bugbears there… The way we’re trying to do our hosting system seems to push the boundaries of quite a lot of software. The problem with most other services which can read from databases, of which proftpd, libpam-pgsql and libnss-pgsql are especially guilty, and powerdns and courier less so, is the assumption that your database is not actually a relational database, but just contains only the tables with the crappy half-baked schemas that they made up, like a database table version of each configuration file. In our case, this is simply not true. We had to switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL so we could use views to patch up the difference between what’s actually in our backend database (customers, domains, e-mail accounts, etc) and what these services expect to see (a table full of only their entities) because they don’t let us specify our own queries.
Heh, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I never got how people could live with those crappy schemas in their databases. I did exactly what you’re doing for a long time, use postgresql + views, and was very happy with that. The reason I changed to LDAP was to make use of replication and partitioning, because we’ve got a number of real servers, and a bunch of servers on simple DSL/cable connection (= unreliable).
I recently made the switch from Courier to Dovecot as well, and am very satisfied with the simplicity and lack of bloat in Dovecot. As you described, setting up SQL authentication was dead simple by creating a couple new PostgreSQL views to our server backend.
I didn’t know of sam’s conversion script (on the French-language page) at the time, so I wrote my own migration script. It works pretty much the same:
http://bendiken.net/scripts/#courier2dovecot
(obi: now that MySQL 5.0 is released, and it supports SQL views as well as master-slave replication, that might perhaps allow the same functionality as you’ve implemented with LDAP?)