[plug] Mailbox speeds (was [OT] Gmail Opinions)

[Craig Ringer]

Trevor Phillips wrote:
> On Friday 18 June 2004 18:22, Craig Ringer wrote:
> 
>>If you want quick searching under Cyrus, "man squatter". It lets you
>>build wonderful full-text indexes of mailboxes, which when combined with
>>IMAP's server-side search means _incredible_ speed. I can do a keyword
>>search of a couple of 10,000 message mailboxes very quickly.
> 
> Cool!

Indeed. I popped it in my cyrus.conf so it runs automatically and 
updates the indexes every night. Very nice.

>>Oh - all this applies to Cyrus 2.1 and 2.2 . If you're running an older
>>version, it's WELL beyond time to upgrade - the improvements are
>>incredible.
> 
> *checks*
> Hmm, I'm running Cyrus *cough*1.5.19*cough*.

Only /approaching/ prehistoric ;-)

> I can see Debian has cyrus21 packages - but not in Woody, and I've managed to 
> keep this server largely Testing/Unstable free. Maybe it's time to take the 
> plunge?

It might be a good idea to try it out. I'd install from source 
personally - it's easy, and gives you better control of when and how you 
upgrade. I tend to use a packaged cyrus-sasl2 and build the mail server 
from source. Note that you will need sasl2, not sasl1.

> Are there many config changes or other large considerations migrating to 1.5.x 
> to 2.1? ie; how much time impact will it hit me with (given that I've made 
> minimal changes to this server over the years) if I just upgraded the 
> packages to 2.1?

I never used 1.5.x, instead skipping directly to 2.1.14. As a result I 
can't give you much detail, but I do know that a fair bit has changed. 
Most importantly, IIRC the mailbox format is not compatible. Unless 
Debian has written some magic upgrade scripts, a package upgrade would 
probably be a bad idea.

The recommended upgrade path from Cyrus <2.x or another IMAP server is 
to run them both in parallel, and use mailutil from the uw-imapd 
distribution to copy the mail from old to new over IMAP. This will 
retain all your flags, seen state, etc. It is _possible_ to copy the 
spool over and reconstruct the cyrus.* files etc, but much easier to use 
mailutil (or another app if you like). As Cyrus supports proxy 
authentication, you can use the admin account to authenticate when 
logging in as any user, so you don't need to worry about the normal pain 
of temporarily resetting user passwords, etc.

Cyrus is a bit of a pain when it comes to configuring authentication, 
but if you have 1.5 going you should already understand sasl, which is 
what gives most people trouble. The easy way is to run saslauthd as 
'saslauthd -a pam', have appropriate 'imap' and 'pop' entries in 
/etc/pam.d, and use:

sasl_mech_list: PLAIN
sasl_pwcheck_method: saslauthd

in imapd.conf

I'd also recommend getting and using the very latest Berkley DB.

If you decide to go ahead with the upgrade and want suggestions on 
anything, feel free to give me a yell.

--
Craig Ringer