Fixing Problems with Cyrus IMAP on Fedora Core 2

[marshall]

Hey everybody.

I just spent a solid 6 or 7 hours working on this problem, and I finally fixed it for good. If you've ever tried using the default Cyrus IMAP that comes with Fedora Core 2 (and is installed by rimuhosting) you will indefinately run into these issues, so here's the explanation and solution I found:

Basically, it looks like FC2's DB4 rpms are compiled with NPTL support which makes it incompatible with nont-Intel (and older pentium) processors.
Here's a link to the bugzilla page:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=91933

The quick fix is to download a patched db4 rpm, and overwrite your current db4 installation with it.

The RPM I downloaded was in this directory:
http://tomi.nomi.cz/download/db4-no-nptl/

I downloaded db42-4.2.52-0.1.i386.rpm. In order for the system to like the rpm I had to install 2 presequites.. tcl-devel and libtool.
Here's links for both (FC2 only..):
ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/core/2/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/libtool-1.5.6-1.i386.rpm
ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/core/2/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/tcl-devel-8.4.5-7.i386.rpm

Here's the commands I ran to make this work (as root):


rpm -Uvh libtool-1.5.6-1.i386.rpm tcl-devel-8.4.5-7.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps db42-4.2.52-0.1.i386.rpm


After those commands were executed everything seemed to work for me. As a side note, it's possible the --force and --nodeps arguments might be unneeded if you use the RPM from here instead:

http://24.79.220.4/db4/

I found these RPMs after the fact, so they might be a bit better (I think they are tailored specifically for FC2)

Hope this helps save someone some time.. and I hope the lovely folks at rimuhosting take a note and replace the default DB4 RPMs in their FC2 install images =).

-Marshall

[retep]

Hi Marshall. Well found.

I've also hit this (once before) on a customers VPS.

I had (naively?) hoped that since this was a RedHat bug (for not correctly detecting the nptl setup) that they would be patching the source and rolling out new RPMs in their updates.

I'm a bit wary of providing a repository, by default, of RimuHosting customized RPMs. However, if someone else runs into a cyrus imap problem, let us know and we'll sort it out (building and installing the new db4 rpms for you). In the mean time the 'regular' xinetd imap daemon works ok (but not as efficiently as cyrus?)

[marshall]

I chose Cyrus IMAP mainly because of the well documented configuration / installation, and it also supports POP3 (+TLS) and IMAP+TLS out of the box.

But, FYI.. This bug has been well known since Redhat 9.0, and Redhat hasn't done anything thus far to remedy the situation...

Also, AFAIK.. This bug effects any software package that uses DB4 as part of the internals (Subversion seemed to be the other high profile project affected by this bug).

Hopefully for the sake of Fedora users Redhat will resolve this problem soon.. at least we have this thread to point people to in the meantime =).