Bad, bad mailserver! (redux)

As a follow up to my initial post on the subject, an additional problem that seems to be affecting people with OS X and Cyrus pertains to new log files. Apparently Cyrus roll’s its log file when it exceeds 10MB. For some people the ownership of the new log file is incorrect (root/wheel instead of cyrus/mail) and it causes Cyrus to fail.

This Apple forum thread offers a fix by Matthias Stegner. He suggests creating a bunch of log files in advance:

touch log.0000000002 
... 
touch log.0000000099 
touch log.0000000100 
chown cyrus:mail * 

This might buy you some time until Apple has posted a fix

3 thoughts on “Bad, bad mailserver! (redux)

  1. Thanks a million. This fix saved me lots of work! The only downside is it seemed to cause all messages, for all users, in all folders to be marked as unread.

    This might also be the result of a reconstruct command I had initiated prior.

  2. Yes, the reconstruct command will result in all of the messages being marked as unread. 🙁 Luckily once you apply the log file hack, you shouldn’t need to run reconstruct very often (if ever).

  3. This fixed mine.. for a little while. I had reconstructed my database, then found this article. All I needed was to create some of these log.000.. files and give them the proper perms. I did this, great. Just had server get to log.00000007 and cyrus changed the perms on the file FROM cyrus:mail to root:mail — and of course cyrus could not access the file again. I had created 50 of these files in anticipation that this would work, but it seems OSXS 10.3.7 had other ideas… (I kept 10.3.7 for now as things are (were) working and I was waiting for 10.4.)

    I am now constructing a script to check perms on these files and if it finds root:mail on any file to change them to cyrus:mail and restart the mail services. Hopefully, until 10.4 is fully tested and approved this will keep the errors at bay…

Comments are closed.