I would like to suggest that user directory hashing be turned back on
in the vpopmail package. Yesterday I went through a lot of grief,
because it wasn't on.
The server runs CentOS 4.4, with kernel-2.6.9-42.0.2.ELsmp. The file
system where /home/vpopmail is stored is /home, and is ext3. It was
created during a fresh install of CentOS 4.3 a few months ago. Ext3 has
a 32000(not 32768) limit hard for coded into a header file for max
links, aka the maximum number of directories that can be directly under
one directory. This became a problem because of the way vpopmail stores
user data when hashing is disabled. Note the problem is only
directories, and not files/inodes. I could still create new files
wherever I liked. But mkdir would return Too many links.
Normal it would be:
/home/vpopmail/domains/(domain)/(hash)/(user)
or
/home/vpopmail/domains/(domain)/(hash)/(hash)/(user)
Without hashing it is:
/home/vpopmail/domains/(domain)/(user)
So without hashing the (domain) directory fills up until it has 31999
users, and then new account creation chokes.
I did read back on the mailing list and found a discussion of this
where people were under the impression that hashing was no longer
needed. As shown above, that is not yet the case. There does exist a
patch for ext3 that raises the limit from 32k to something like 65k, but
that just doubles the limit. Which would help, but wouldn't solve the
long term problem. Red Hat seems to plan to include the patch as part of
ext4, which is still in development.
I understand that changing it now will create other problems. One
example I read was that disabling hashing enables the ability to have
e-mail addresses that begin with a single character. In that hashing
creates 0-9, a-z, and A-Z directories to store user directories in. If
the default was changed, then if anyone had created single character
addresses would need to migrate them. I also know hashing is less
intuitive and predictable, but it isn't hard to lookup where a user's
directory is with vuserinfo.
Overall I recommend that the option be changed back to vpopmail's
default, on. But maybe only after a reliable migration script/procedure
can be devised.
As a side note, another side issue I ran into in the process was that
after recompiling vpopmail for hashing I also had to recompile
qmailadmin before qmailadmin would use hashing. qmailadmin statically
links libvpopmail, via libvpopmail.a, into itself. Hence if you
recompile vpopmail it is wise to recompile qmailadmin also.
Patch to increase the subdirecotry limit:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=15272441
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