[SOLVED] Maildir & Full Disk

fusion1275 · 08-17-2009, 06:50 AM

Hi all,

I have a bit of a problem with my mail server at home.

Over the weekend I have built a mail server on my Ubuntu machine in my cupboard.

This runs Fetchmail => Postfix => Spamassassin => dovecot = Thunderbird + squirrelmail using IMAP

All is working like a dream except for 1 thing I have noticed.... I only have 90MB left on my disk. Eventually it will start filling up rapidly as I have my new Maildir configured.

Can you advise if I can re-direct my Maildir to my raid storage partition (500GB) under /mnt/raid/Mail/Maildir

or am I stuffed and will have to re-install or clone using a new/larger disk because it only runs under my /home/fusion1275/Maildir directory??

I hope someone has a solution for me. This could end up quite a serious issue for me.

Many thanks in advance.

EricTRA · 08-17-2009, 07:15 AM

Hello,

Came across this one in my link archive: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-147086.html. It should help you with your mailbox location.

Kind regards,

Eric

fusion1275 · 08-17-2009, 07:47 AM

Hi Eric,

Thanks again for your reply. Do you think if I add this to my /etc/postfix/main.cf file:

Quote:

MAILDIR=/mnt/raid/Mail/Maildir

and leave this to its default:

Quote:

home_mailbox = Maildir/

I might have some luck??

All the directories and permissions are already there. I just cannot get the mail to go its new destination.

fusion1275 · 08-17-2009, 08:13 AM

By the way this is what mailbox setting I have in my dovecot.conf file:

Quote:

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

fusion1275 · 08-18-2009, 04:23 PM

Hi all,

Just wanted to post an update and close off this topic as I have solved my own problem.

So here I will take you briefly through the task to solve my disk space issue on my Mail Server.

Quote:

MY 10 STEP SOLUTION

Step 1:

Used LVM to create a logical volume of 50GB for my home directory. This is situated on my raid set of 500GB.

Quote:

pvscan
fdisk -l
mount
pvcreate /dev/md0
pvdisplay
fdisk -l
vgcreate Sapphire-home /dev/md0
vgdisplay
lvcreate --name home --size 50G Sapphire-home
lvdisplay

Step 2:

Created the filesystem on the home partition as ext3

Quote:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/Sapphire-home/home

Step 3:

Made a temp home directory called /mnt/newhome and then mounted it on the new filesystem I created.

Quote:

mkdir /mnt/newhome
ll /mnt/
mount /dev/Sapphire-home/home /mnt/newhome/
mount

Step 4:

Copied everything from my old home directory to my temp newhome directory then did a word count and checked they tally up. Then had a brief look for any permission problems which there weren't any as my copy command preserved all perms.

Quote:

cd /home/
cp -Rp * /mnt/newhome/
find . -ls |wc -l
cd /mnt/newhome/
find . -ls |wc -l

Step5:

Unmounted newhome and stopped all my mail apps on the server.

Quote:

umount /mnt/newhome/
/etc/init.d/fetchmail stop
/etc/init.d/postfix stop
/etc/init.d/spamassassin stop
/etc/init.d/saslauthd stop
/etc/init.d/dovecot stop

Step 6:

Moved the original /home directory to /oldhome and then made a new directory called /home.

Quote:

mv /home /old_home
cd /
ll
mkdir /home

Step 7:

Mounted my new logical volume to the newly created /home using the logical volume name and path.

Quote:

mount /dev/Sapphire-home/home /home
ll /home/
df -ah /home/

Step 8:

Amended the /etc/fstab to incorporate the new mount point.

Quote:

view /etc/fstab
/dev/Sapphire-home/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2

Step 9:

Started the mail server apps up again. Sent a test mail to myself and looked at the logs to make sure all is well and happy.

Quote:

/etc/init.d/dovecot start
/etc/init.d/saslauthd start
/etc/init.d/spamassassin start
/etc/init.d/postfix start
/etc/init.d/fetchmail start
ps -ef
cd /var/log
ll
tail -f mail.log
cd /home/fusion/Maildir/

Here is a little loop I ran whilst opening a new terminal and running the email string:
while :
do
clear
ls -lrt
sleep 1
done

Now in the new terminal I ran this:

echo TESTING | mail -s "TESTER 1 2 3" <whatever your email address is>

Step 10:

Did a backup of the old home directory and archived it. Then removed the /oldhome dir and rebooted the system

Quote:

tar -cvf - /old_home/ | gzip -c > /home/OLDHOME.tgz
cd /
ll
rm -R /old_home/
df -ah
init 6

If anyone would like a command list of the above tasks please drop me a msg as I still have all of them in my bash_history file.

I hope this will help many others who might of fallen in the same trap as me to building a mail server without checking the disk space first.

Cheers!!

chrism01 · 08-18-2009, 05:51 PM

If you could add the cmds to this thread, we'd all benefit, now and in the future.

fusion1275 · 08-19-2009, 12:31 PM

Commands added above as requested.

I hope they help others as they did me