debian

The updated version of snmpd in Debian Etch doesn't seem to like our customised vif interfaces names that we're using for Xen hosting. I'm seeing the error "ioctl 35123 returned -1" in syslog every 5 minutes. Reverting to the standard "vifx.y" format fixes the problem.

I started using xen guest names for vif interfaces to allow our graphing system (Cacti) to keep track of which interface matched a particular guest. For example a guest called acme would have an interface called acme.eth0 in the xen host instead of a dynamically generated name like vif14.0. This seemed to be working fine with Sarge, but alas not with Etch. I tried some variations like acme-eth0 and acme.0, but nothing seems to get rid of the error except vifx.y.

One of Cyrus IMAP's more sophisticated features is the ability to create indexes of messages and mailboxes to allow fast searching of headers and message text.

The indexing is done using squatter, and is best achieved by launching it at regular intervals from cyrus.conf:

EVENTS {
...
# indexing of mailboxs for server side fulltext searches
# reindex changed mailboxes (fulltext) approximately every other hour
squatter_1 cmd="nice -n 19 squatter -s" period=120
# reindex all mailboxes (fulltext) daily
squatter_a cmd="squatter" at=0517
...
}

Once the indexes have been created, the improvement in search performance is dramatic.

There's a bug in the current SASL2 SQL library (libsasl2-modules-sql) which means it logs at debug level all the time, and there's no way of switching it off. This fills up auth.log with junk because the default syslog configuration on Debian logs all auth output including debug which makes logcheck unusable.

Until SASL2 is fixed, the only way I've found to work around this is to reduce the logging level for auth and authpriv to exclude debug messages. For syslog-ng this requires the following change to /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf