catastrophic recovery required

[Matthias Andree]

Ben Finney <ben at benfinney.id.au> writes:

>> What a way to start the day -- an error on the far side of the world,
>> in the land down under.  Uh, boy!
>
> Hey, the 'net is global, just like spam :-)

Gee, feed your spam to the alligators. :-P

> In short, the error seems to be gone now, after a 'bf_compact'.  Thus, I
> can't reproduce it to answer everyone's helpful questions :-/

Well... bf_compact may have omitted the shards when it copied
everything. OTOH, apparently the database was in good enough shape for
the dump/reload cycle.

>> This bogus recommendation will be fixed in the next bogofilter release,
>> the code has been in CVS for a couple of days now.
>
> Ah.  To be replaced by what?  A different suggestion, or no
> suggestion?

Different, more helpful suggestions (that point to the manual <grins>)

>> Particularly, does "db_verify wordlist.db" pass without errors (no
>> output at all means "good")?
>
> I don't seem to have the 'db_verify' command.

Old story. May be renamed to db43_verify, db_verify-4.3 or similar, and
it may be in a separate package.

>> Have you removed log files?
>
> I didn't; I merely ran the 'bogoutil --db-recover-harder ~/.bogofilter'
> command.

OK. This needs ALL log files in place, --db-recover-harder can easily
fail if log files have EVER been removed. --db-recover should usually
suffice.

>> Have you copied around log files or .db files?
>
> Not manually, though I presume that's what my nightly 'bf_compact' is
> doing.

Indeed it does. After bf_compact, --db-recover-harder can no longer
work. --db-recover can, however.

>> Has your computer crashed (power failure, or perhaps kernel panic when
>> a filesystem was mounted asynch)?
>
> In the last few weeks I've had several power failures, yes.  No
> filesystem anomolies though (praise journalled filesystems :-)

Please review the sections on write caching, section 2.3 and appendix A
in README.db (use the shipped or the version I posted recently, doesn't
matter, same information).

>> See section 3.3 of the enclosed document (below) for recovery options.
>
> Thanks.  I think this one (README.db) is included in Debian's bogofilter
> package.

The document I posted is likely newer than what's in 0.93.5.

-- 
Matthias Andree