Saturday July 16, 2005

Cyrus Imapd and DB Errors upgrading Fedora Core 3 to 4

SO.... There I was... upgrading a remote server (my personal colo box) which is hosted at aplus.net, and which is running Fedora Core 3, to Fedora Core 4.

I've upgraded before, but this time was different, as in the intervening year I've been running up2date and yum on different repositories, and using devel packages and stuff like that. The box is basically a remote, always-up, box that I can play with. I do dev stuff, and compile on it, run an apache server, imap server, get my personal email there, etc, etc.

This time, I had to back out of a bunch of patches, and try to upgrade to Fedora 4. Long story short, the major problem I had was that my IMAP server was b0rked. Dropping lots of errors like:

Googling the issue shows a lot of people having the same error, but not really any useful solutions. Some people want to use db4_recover or other db4 utils to try and rescue the databases. The actual solution for me was quite a bit easier.

The directory /var/lib/imap/db contains the db files that the above processes are complaining about. The easy solution is to:

If those steps don't work for you right away, you can also try the cyrus commands, 'ctl_recover -r' and 'reconstruct -m -r'. I've used those in the past to help me recover cyrus servers when upgrading.

Anyways... I hope this helps someone... If google every finds my blog. :)

At least I'll always have the answer myself, if I need it.