[Dovecot] mbox locking

Thomas Hummel hummel at pasteur.fr
Tue Jun 27 14:57:46 EEST 2006


On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 12:31:27PM +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 18:03 +0200, Thomas Hummel wrote:
> > Hello, 

> >   - "mbox_dotlock_change_timeout" directive :
> > 
> >     a process seeing that an already locked (by another process) mbox
> >     he want to access hasn't change for this amount of time, allows
> >     himself to override the lock ? 
> 
> Right. It checks that both the mbox and the dotlock file hasn't changed.

Thanks for your answers. 

But still I don't get the use of overriding the dotlock since the
other process that put that dotlock may well have fcntl'ed the mbox
too (it could use a "dotlock + fcntl" exclusive locking method, just
as dovecot does - it could be another dovecot mail process).

So don't we risk to end up in a situation where the dotlock is ours
but the mailbox is still fcntl-locked by another process ?

-- 
Thomas Hummel 	    | Institut Pasteur
<hummel at pasteur.fr> | Pôle informatique - systèmes et réseau


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