You might know the situation, something happened, and afterwards you get error messages from Cyrus telling you that your databases just have crashed. Then, your Inbox is shown empty while the filesystem does show the correct files.

What happened?

Every Cyrus folder contains three files «cyrus.cache», «cyrus.header» and «cyrus.index». These are responsible for telling the mail client how many mails the specific folder contains and which flag has been set per mail. they are your per-folder-message-database. And that’s exactly the point why Cyrus is that much faster than any other MDA. If a mail client connects, the server just looks into these databases to serve the necessary information and just if you actually read the message, it is being loaded.
So if these databases are being corrupted, you won’t see anything but big emptiness although you might have several millions of messages physically stored in the folder.

Here are some example error messages…

Jan 12 15:02:32 host cyrus/imap[23319]: DBERROR: dbenv->open ‘/var/imap/db’ failed: Permission denied
Jan 12 15:02:32 host cyrus/imap[23319]: DBERROR: init() on berkeley
Jan 12 15:02:32 host cyrus/imap[23319]: DBERROR: reading /var/imap/db/skipstamp, assuming the worst: Permission denied
Jan 12 15:02:32 host cyrus/imap[23319]: executed
Jan 12 15:02:32 host cyrus/imap[23319]: IOERROR: opening /var/imap/mailboxes.db: Permission denied
Jan 12 15:02:32 host cyrus/imap[23319]: DBERROR: opening /var/imap/mailboxes.db: cyrusdb error
Jan 12 15:02:32 host cyrus/imap[23319]: Fatal error: can’t read mailboxes file
Jan 12 16:00:21 host cyrus/imaps[31010]: DBERROR db4: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
Jan 12 16:00:21 host cyrus/imaps[31010]: DBERROR: critical database situation
Jan 12 16:04:32 host cyrus/lmtpunix[31504]: DBERROR: opening /var/imap/deliver.db: Permission denied
Jan 12 16:04:32 host cyrus/lmtpunix[31504]: DBERROR: opening /var/imap/deliver.db: cyrusdb error
Jan 12 16:04:32 host cyrus/lmtpunix[31504]: FATAL: lmtpd: unable to init duplicate delivery database

Yes, this is exactly my problem! What’s next?

We created a little script that runs through every user’s mailbox and rebuilds the databases. the only problem is that after a successfull rebuild every message is being marked as unread. But that’s a rather small problem, we think.  )

Where can I get it from? I’m in a hurry!

We know you are. But before you download, please have a look at the readme or at least at the file in order to assure that the settings are correct. And don’t forget to backup. We do not grant for anything.

Download

Gentoo users can use our siczb portage overlay. Please have a look at this article to get to know how to access the overlay.

We finally managed to release a package for the (currently) recent version of Best Practical’s Request Racker (rt). We added it to our layman / portage overlay. see the following article for information on how to add it to your portage tree.

Additional Notes:

• There are several packages which are masked at the moment. We do not know what they do to your system.
• The additional dev-perl/Encode is an rt dependency which probably will override some files originally owned by perl itself.
• The USE flag “fastcgi” seems to be mandatory. In other words, rt won’t compile if you don’t set this flag.
• As you might have realized by now, the whole thing is still under development so please be very careful with you system. We do not grant for anything.

Gentoo has, is and will be the distribution of our choice. As it is with every love, nothing is perfect. So is Gentoo. We missed the recent packages for Bestpractical’s Request Tracker. Therefore, we created our own Layman overlay. That’s a thing we were thinking of for a long time and now there was a good chance to play around. Okay, here’s what you should do in order to use the overlay:

• edit your local layman overlay file (e.g. /usr/portage/local/layman/cache_65bd38402ac8431067b54904bd2ed2d1.xml)

• add the following before the </layman> line:

<overlay
contact=”direktion@informations-compagnie.de”
name=”siczb”
src=”http://dev.informations-compagnie.de/svn/gentoo”
status=”unofficial”
type=”svn”>
<link>http://dev.informations-compagnie.de/svn/gentoo</link
<description>
Additional packages by saechsische Informations-Compagnie zu Berlin
</description>
</overlay>

• do a simple layman -a siczb to add our repo to your portage tree

As usual, we do not grant for anything. So don’t blame us if your box suddenly starts burning.