Home dirs on NFS - POP3 Failing

[rharby]

Last night we moved our /home mount to be NFS based, and everything seems to be working fine with the exception of POP3. When I telnet to the POP3 port and enter my username and password I get the following:

cannot get file lock on /home/caarcomm/mail/caarnet.com/rharby/inbox: No locks available at bin/cppop.pl line 1437.
cannot get file lock on /home/caarcomm/mail/caarnet.com/rharby/.cppop.cache: No locks available at bin/cppop.pl line 1437.
+OK You have 26 messages totaling 306484 octets from /home/caarcomm/mail/caarnet.com/rharby/inbox (quick cache v9)

Any ideas how to resolve this, doesn't appear any other program is having problems locking for mail delivery, exim, etc.. Thanks in advance for any help.

[chirpy]

You'll have to ask cPanel as cppop is closed source via a support ticket - it's entirely possible that it won't work on an NFS partition (locking is one of the most common reason I've seen for apps not working on NFS partitions).

[cPanelBilly]

NFS partitions by default cannot accept lock files, you will need to put the home partition on something that can.

[rharby]

You say by default nfs can't lock, however everything else works using fcntl calls to do file locks, which works over NFS. For example Exim has no problem delivering to the mailboxes, and it locks the mailboxes... It appears to just be a problem in how CPPOP does it's file lock. I'm a bit dismayed in that we bought a new file server with raid JUST to do this and now you're telling me we can't because cppop won't lock, however everything else works fine...

[bigj]

Im using a NetApp FAS250 and it locks files just fine. Make sure all the required nfs client programs are running otherwise you will run into problems. I had statd die on me last weekend for no reason and the server quit delivery mail, and was eating it. You may have to look at both the client and server log files to determine what the real root of the problem is though.

I've posted this before but NFS doesn't not work out of the box like a block device (local disk) does with Cpanel. When you add a new account you'll need to edit the nfs server's quota file otherwise the customer won't work. IMO that defeats the purpose of having cpanel in the first place.

I should also point out that the customer's disk usage will not be reported correctly when they log in to their cpanel if you're using nfs.

My filer supports iscsi so I am in the process of moving all the customer data to that. It will allow me to create a new lun and treat it as a block device. If you have the ability to do it I would stop messing with nfs and put your effort into that.

The linux iscsi project is located here: http://linux-iscsi.sourceforge.net/

And in the future it may be better to put all the raid features into the cpanel server itself. You can then use the nfs server for mounting and backing up the OS and customer data.

PM me if you have any questions.

[UPDATE]:

Now that I think of it maybe the problem you're seeing is the fact quotas are not setup on the nfs server. Do a 'quota -v <username>' from the client machine and see what it says for the quota.

[/UPDATE]


bigj