[Kolab-devel] Kontact reliability - revisited

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi,

On Tuesday 17 July 2007 15:46, ITSEF Admin wrote:
> I'm sorry to bring this up again, but given the increasing distrust of our
> users against Kolab/Kontact, I just *have* to come up with a solution...

no problem, we appreciate your input.

> We have some 35 users, all using Kontact proko2 (by now 2.1.7) on SuSE
> 10.0. 

For others: It is important to know that KK offers full professional support
for Kontact on a set of systems. This largely depends on if we have
enough business to fund tighter quality control, packaging and 
the occasional large effort for the really hard problems that are sometimes 
related to other libraries on the platform.
Most stable currently is Debian Sarge/Proko2 branch.
Debian Etch/Enterprise Branch is quite close behind this
and will be the next platform.

Back to Thomas problem:

> Our home directories are NFS mounted, *however*, due to performance 
> problems (issue1464), I switched to a combined setup early on. Combined
> means that $HOME/.kde/share/config and $HOME/.kde/apps/kmail/dimap are
> *not* on the NFS share, but on the local drive and then linked in using
> symbolic links[0]. I know that some Kolab developers frown upon NFS in this
> context (and for plausible reasons, too). However, given that the important
> directories are local, I think that NFS should not be the culprit here? Or
> am I missing something?

The setup seems to be good enough.
More likely with your symtoms is that the Suse KDE Libraries
are part of the problem (my unproven guess).

> Anyway, there are increasing rumours (I know, I know...) about kontact
> being unreliable and so far, six users filed one or more reports about
> vanishing events. I followed up on a few of them and was able to find the
> following facts:
>
> - Some cases were due to issue1498 (appointments vanish from view, but come
> back after a restart)

I have pinged developers about this. As we do not see this on Debian,
it might be related to the Suse KDE setup or libraries.
We are close to releasing Proko2 2.1.8, but I am unsure if this would help
much, but there are improvements in there which could help.

> - In several cases, events were created but they somehow vanished from the
> server

You need to find out if they have been on the server in the first place.
Things to try:
* Check the imapd logs, you should be able to follow created and deleted
  emails in there.
* do lists of the files more often for the users
in question.

> - I had two cases where the agenda was emptied completely. As far as I
> understand the whole system, this should only happen if for some reason the
> local DIMAP cache is removed, right? In that case, I *might* tend to put it
> down to [0].

Also find out how many users have write access to the folder in question.
Are you talking about single user folders?

With Agenda: Do you mean the objects of one calender folder?

> For the three most affected users, I've created an additional 24h hourly
> backup, however, that does not help if the user only realises that an event
> has disappeared days after the creation.

Lists of the files in shorter periods might help.
You could count the number of files on the server in the calender folders
and examine any change to find out what might be going on and regain trust.

> I myself am using the exact same setup, but have yet to loose a single
> appointment, despite intense use - one of the reasons why this is so
> difficult to handle... I still do not exclude user mistakes, to be honest,
> however, right now I can't quite see how a user can accidentally, without
> noticing, remove an appointment himself.

Do they physically switch off machines?
Unreported crashes?

> Also, I'd love to get rid of the scripting hacks. However, from what I
> gather from previous responses, if we continue to use NFS, all bets are off
> as far as the Kolab team is concerned, so we'd definitely have to consider
> moving to AFS - is that the official stance now?

We can only work with what we have
and KDE / Kontact does not seem to be NFS safe.
KDE 4 hopefully will change this, but it is far away.
My guess is that your problems are not related to the filesystem,
so I would examine other things first, because the problems might
just stay if you move the AFS.

> As always, thanks in advance for all and any insights you might have for
> me. I'm really scratching my head here, especially, as I see no other
> reports about similar problems e.g. on kolab-users - so there is a chance
> we're doing something stupid. If only I knew... :-}

This is why I guess that the special versions you are using for KDE
 libraries from Suse could be the problem. I do not think the combination
is used very often.

You could try to see if you have more success with Enterprise branch,
this is in a testing/beta stage right now. It would be an alternative path
which would enable you to use newer KDE versions for the libraries as well
getting you closer to where other KDE developers are.

Best,
Bernhard

-- 
Managing Director - Owner: www.intevation.net      (Free Software Company)
Germany Coordinator: fsfeurope.org. Coordinator: www.Kolab-Konsortium.com.
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998
Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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