665010 - If the configuration is stored via NFS and the space or quota on the export is exceeded, all settings get lost.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 597329

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Franz-Waltraud Stainmeier]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5; kr) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.1 Safari/525.27.1
Build Identifier: 3.1.11pre

In our deployment we store our users homes on NFS-Servers, which export their directories with the options (rw,sync,no_subtree_check). Sometimes the users exceed their quota. Then, if thunderbird is closed with the quota still exceeded, parts of the configuration get lost, for example the Accounts and most likely all other settings, because the NFS does not close filehandles quickly enough when the quota is exceeded (or the remote disk is full).
This problem does not occur, if you store the configuration of thunderbird on a local disk.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a small virtual disk with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/disk bs=1M count=10M"
2. Create a filesystem on that space "mkfs.ext3 /tmp/disk"
3. Mount the filesystem "mount -o loop /tmp/disk /mnt/something"
4. Install nfs-kernel-server, mountd, rpcd and stuff you need to export and mount NFS-directories
5. Export your example disk, with entrie into /etc/exports like:
/mnt/something 127.0.0.1(rw,async,no_subtree_check)
6. Restart the NFS-Kernelserver or use exportfs -r
7. Mount the NFS-Directory "mount 127.0.0.1:/mnt/something /mnt/something2"
8. Create a directory for the thunderbird-configuration on that filesystem which is mounted via NFS "mkdir /mnt/something2/thunderbird"
9. Backup you thunderbird-configuration eg. "cp ~/.thunderbird ~/.thunderbird.bak"
10. link the directory from the NFS-mount so that the configuration is saved there "ln -s /mnt/something2/thunderbird ~/.thunderbird"
11. Start thunderbird and create a sample account, keep thunderbird running
12. Fill the disk with zeros "dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/something2/foo bs=1024 count=10000000000"
13. Close thunderbird
14. Start thunderbird again, and see that the whole configuration is lost

Actual Results:  
The Configuration is saved, even the disk is full or the quota exceeded, so some files get emtied and the settings are lost.

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird should check if the quota (or diskspace) is (nearly) exceeded before writing to the configurationfiles, because NFS does not react with a "disk full" immediatly, instead it reads some bytes from the stream, creates an empty file, then recognizes that the disk is full and then informs the application that the diskspace (quota) is exceeded.

Comment 1

[Franz-Waltraud Stainmeier]

Good morning,

made a small mistake describing the error regarding the NFS-options sync and async. In my OP I describe the NFS-Servers in our deployment as sync, but make the test with an async NFS-server. However the error surely also happens with a sync'ed server, as I test it at the moment.
Only the last sentence of my 'excpected Results' is a bit different, because if sync is activated, NFS directly cuts the stream on an exceeded diskspace (vs. async caches much data), but it also overwrites files if the disk is full (so our problem still exists).

Have a nice week everybody

Comment 2

[Rainer Bielefeld]

@Reporter:
Still a problem for you?