Andy Kopciuch's Blog
Thursday, March 20, 2008
IMAP, EVMS & Rich Bilec Turns 40!
So I started to have some problems with my E-Mail lately. I have cached IMAP account setup on my desktop and laptop. It had been working fine for many moons now. All of a sudden, something bizarre started to occur. I would check my email, and later when I checked again, I would receive the same messages again. Strange. So I investigated, and when this happened once many months ago, I ended up forcefully removing a problem email, that was causing problems. No big deal. This time ... that was not the problem. In fact I still do not know what the problem is.
The symptoms were discovered after many trial and error lessons, and some digging on my mail server. Turns out that when IMAP checks the mail the mail spool file is not shrunk. Not a problem ... I only checked once, so it's not pushed back the changes. but it should push back all of the changes when I check my mail the second time right? Nope ... seems something is borked with the IMAP process. I'm not sure exactly how, or when this happened. I rebuilt the indexes, several times ... individually, and recursively. I have refreshed the IMAP cache, same dealio. I have cleared out folders, and synched them individually. Kmail would crash when refreshing the IMAP cache on the "inbox" though. Odd. I really ran the gamut of possibilities, and still had this issue. I thought ... maybe the KDE packages have problems I'm running. Maybe I'll just dist-upgrade to gutsy. That should be stable. I'll get to the upgrade in a minute. After the upgrade I realized I was already running the gutsy version of KDE, so I effectively upgraded to the same thing. meh.
I was working all day on the laptop, and started to have the same problems. I finally gave up because I just couldn't live without email all day on site, working on 3-4 different projects at once. So I sort of solved my problem this way. Removing the IMAP account from "Check Mail", adding a POP3s account to check mail, and letting my filters shuffle email around into the IMAP store, and then manually synching that. I shouldn't have to do that ... but I can not afford to waste any time dicking around with email ... I NEED THAT TO GET MY WORK DONE!
Back to the upgrade. Let it run over night. Woke to something completed, and ran apt-get dist-upgrade again ... to make sure all is good. Watched it do its thang and all seemed good. Until I rebooted. So I basically had a useless box at this point. the screen was repeated showing a device mapping error, linear, ld-liner or something to that effect. Continuous looping output on the tty. Nice ... well done unbuntu.Thank god I have multiple machines around, and could get to google.
It turns out that EVMS is installed during the upgrade but breaks the kernel 2.6.22, and it totally broke the kernel, so I couldn't do _anything_. Back to grub, boot into safe mode on an older kernel. apt-get remove evms, reboot. All is good again. It was alarming, and a big piss off for me. Then I thought ... what if this happened to some novice linux user on their only home computer? What would they do then. They would have been screwed not knowing the solution, and not having the ability to research it. Then I also thought ... why isn't this fixed ... 4 months after release? Why has ubuntu not placed a newer kernel in the updates, that could have been applied during the dist-upgrade? That's just plain bad. I mean ... get on the ball. I have to honestly say, when I got my machine up and running, I spent some time looking into Open SuSE.
I lied ... he's not really 40. I'm not saying how old he is, he's a little sensitive ;). I went out on the weekend for a little socializing. Diner at Tony Roma's with Rich, Claudio, Jono, and Craig. Then to the Kilt for some drinks, met Kish, Vish, and Preet. I quit drinking early on. I ate too much at diner, and it just wasn't going down. Plus I was super tired. I headed home around 12:30ish. Got to watch the flyers take a shit kicking the next morning 7-1. but they won last night ... Hanging on to 8th place baby! ΒΆ 12:08:00 AM 0 comments
The symptoms were discovered after many trial and error lessons, and some digging on my mail server. Turns out that when IMAP checks the mail the mail spool file is not shrunk. Not a problem ... I only checked once, so it's not pushed back the changes. but it should push back all of the changes when I check my mail the second time right? Nope ... seems something is borked with the IMAP process. I'm not sure exactly how, or when this happened. I rebuilt the indexes, several times ... individually, and recursively. I have refreshed the IMAP cache, same dealio. I have cleared out folders, and synched them individually. Kmail would crash when refreshing the IMAP cache on the "inbox" though. Odd. I really ran the gamut of possibilities, and still had this issue. I thought ... maybe the KDE packages have problems I'm running. Maybe I'll just dist-upgrade to gutsy. That should be stable. I'll get to the upgrade in a minute. After the upgrade I realized I was already running the gutsy version of KDE, so I effectively upgraded to the same thing. meh.
I was working all day on the laptop, and started to have the same problems. I finally gave up because I just couldn't live without email all day on site, working on 3-4 different projects at once. So I sort of solved my problem this way. Removing the IMAP account from "Check Mail", adding a POP3s account to check mail, and letting my filters shuffle email around into the IMAP store, and then manually synching that. I shouldn't have to do that ... but I can not afford to waste any time dicking around with email ... I NEED THAT TO GET MY WORK DONE!
Back to the upgrade. Let it run over night. Woke to something completed, and ran apt-get dist-upgrade again ... to make sure all is good. Watched it do its thang and all seemed good. Until I rebooted. So I basically had a useless box at this point. the screen was repeated showing a device mapping error, linear, ld-liner or something to that effect. Continuous looping output on the tty. Nice ... well done unbuntu.Thank god I have multiple machines around, and could get to google.
It turns out that EVMS is installed during the upgrade but breaks the kernel 2.6.22, and it totally broke the kernel, so I couldn't do _anything_. Back to grub, boot into safe mode on an older kernel. apt-get remove evms, reboot. All is good again. It was alarming, and a big piss off for me. Then I thought ... what if this happened to some novice linux user on their only home computer? What would they do then. They would have been screwed not knowing the solution, and not having the ability to research it. Then I also thought ... why isn't this fixed ... 4 months after release? Why has ubuntu not placed a newer kernel in the updates, that could have been applied during the dist-upgrade? That's just plain bad. I mean ... get on the ball. I have to honestly say, when I got my machine up and running, I spent some time looking into Open SuSE.
I lied ... he's not really 40. I'm not saying how old he is, he's a little sensitive ;). I went out on the weekend for a little socializing. Diner at Tony Roma's with Rich, Claudio, Jono, and Craig. Then to the Kilt for some drinks, met Kish, Vish, and Preet. I quit drinking early on. I ate too much at diner, and it just wasn't going down. Plus I was super tired. I headed home around 12:30ish. Got to watch the flyers take a shit kicking the next morning 7-1. but they won last night ... Hanging on to 8th place baby! ΒΆ 12:08:00 AM 0 comments
