Safe to use bogofilter over NFS?

[Matthias Andree]

Glenn Morris <gmorris+bf at ast.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> Is it safe to invoke bogofilter from procmail, when both the
> bogofilter executable and wordlist.db are located on NFS-mounted
> directories?
>
> The FAQ <URL:http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net/faq.php#nfs> seems to
> say pretty unambiguously that, yes, it is safe. And indeed I have had
> no problems through several versions of bogofilter up to and including
> 0.92.8.
>
> But in that case I don't understand the response to my bug report
> <URL:http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1065311&group_id=62265&atid=499997>,
> namely the statement "Bogofilter does not support databases on NFS
> storage". I don't see what `make check' does that is any different to
> normal operation.

I wrote that response.

It is not "make check" that is different, but versions 0.93.0 and newer
are different from 0.92.8, as is detailed in the RELEASE.NOTES. I may
need to add a note about NFS.

Bogofilter up to 0.92.8 used the simple Berkeley DB Data Store, which we
need to lock against concurrent use - there can only be at most one
writer, or at most N readers at the same time, but not mixed.

Bogofilter up to 0.92.8 could be configured (by setting an environment
variable) to use the "concurrent" datastore which was never properly
documented and didn't work across NFS.

Bogofilter 0.93.0 and newer use the Berkeley DB Transactional Data
Store, which writes a Berkeley DB environment - and _this_ does not work
with the database in NFS.

While it is theoretically possible to put the database files into NFS,
the environment (__db.* and log.* files) must be in a filesystem local
to the server running the applications or test. I am not sure if
bogofilter can currently handle that, never tried.

-- 
Matthias Andree