database corruption

[Dave Lovelace]

Matthias Andree wrote, in part:
> 
> David Relson <relson at osagesoftware.com> writes:
> 
> > Question for those of you with problems:  What versions of bogofilter
> > and BerkeleyDB are you using?  What operating system?  If there're are
> > problems it's important to know about it.
> 
> The point is: what was the oldest bogofilter version that has been used?
> 
> I've seen errors "sleep" in the data base that later cause trouble as
> the data base grows.
> 
Aha.  0.11.1.3.  And very likely it was under that that the trouble arose.
I spent some time - way too much, given the results - restoring successively
older goodlist.db files from tape, and they all (going back a couple of
months now) showed similar-looking lists of errors.  (I didn't bother
looking in detail at the specific errors - but about the same amount of
screen real estate, & the same kinds of errors, were involved.)

> Other question: is NFS or another networked file system involved? If
> yes, does it support fcntl()-locking?
> 
Well, yes and no.  The machine this is on uses NFS, & it doesn't support
fcntl().  But bogofilter has not been run over it, only locally.

<snipping instructions for repairing>
That appears to have produced at least a reasonable-looking database,
something less than 2/3 the size of the bad one.  We'll have to see
whether performance suffers, but I don't really expect anything too bad.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

-- 
- Dave Lovelace
  dave at firstcomp.biz
  davel at cyberspace.org