http://vimeo.com/8201309

I generally don’t post web links but it’s been slow here on the blog and this is a clever project.

They built a series of simple, nicely designed chairs, left them on the streets of NYC, monitored them via video and GPS to see who took them.

I’m having theme issues, a consistent look will return shortly.

After a morning of troubleshooting poor performance on an archive store that was causing backups on the mtas I would bet we’ve hit a regression. Zimbra doesn’t recognize it.

One of the admins IM’ed me a little after 9am yesterday complaining of queue backups on the mtas delivering to the archive store. They have 5 user stores and 1 archive store.

Connecting to port 7025 (lmtp) on the archive store shows sporadic hangs. Some mail was getting in but thousands were backed up on the mtas.

A quick look at the mailbox.log showed errors connecting to the conversion daemon:

2009-03-05 10:25:54,909 WARN  [LmtpServer-20] [name=user-20080704@domain.tld.archive;
mid=70;] ParsedMessage - Unable to parse part 2 (file.pdf, application/pdf) of
message with Message-ID <000f01c29c4e$3434d3c0$315c200a@user.domain.tld>.
com.zimbra.cs.mime.MimeHandlerException: cannot extract text
    at com.zimbra.cs.mime.handler.DefaultHandler.getContentImpl(
DefaultHandler.java:117)
    at com.zimbra.cs.mime.MimeHandler.getContent(MimeHandler.java:148)
    at com.zimbra.cs.mime.ParsedMessage.analyzePart(ParsedMessage.java:1148)
    at com.zimbra.cs.mime.ParsedMessage.analyzeNonBodyParts(ParsedMessage.java:426)
...
Caused by: com.zimbra.cs.convert.ConversionException: Cannot extract text from
document that previously crashed convertd.
    at com.zimbra.cs.convert.TransformationClient.extract(
TransformationClient.java:196)
    at com.zimbra.cs.convert.SocketTransformationStub.doExtract(
SocketTransformationStub.java:84)
    at com.zimbra.cs.convert.SocketTransformationStub.extract(
SocketTransformationStub.java:116)
    at com.zimbra.cs.mime.handler.DefaultHandler.getContentImpl(
DefaultHandler.java:111)
    ... 27 more

So on first look convertd died, I restarted it:
su - zimbra -c "zmconvertctl start"

convertd started and the errors in mailbox.log went away. But kvoop processes started to consume cpu. The load rose to almost 30.

This is the kvoop bug we fixed by turning of attachment indexing.. So I checked that and archiving is on again on the archive cos(!)

zimbra@host log]$ zmprov gc default |grep -i attachment
zimbraAttachmentsBlocked: FALSE
zimbraAttachmentsIndexingEnabled: FALSE
zimbraAttachmentsViewInHtmlOnly: FALSE
[zimbra@host log]$ zmprov gc archive |grep -i attachment
zimbraAttachmentsBlocked: FALSE
zimbraAttachmentsIndexingEnabled: TRUE
zimbraAttachmentsViewInHtmlOnly: FALSE
[zimbra@host log]$ 

zimbra@host log]$ zmprov modifyCos archive zimbraAttachmentsIndexingEnabled
FALSE
zimbra@host log]$

I flushed the queues and all is well.

Background:

http://wiki.zimbra.com/index.php?title=Disable_Indexing_for_Specific_File_Types

http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=14016

Look at the bottom of the bugzilla link: It looks to me like we’re hitting a regression: a bug they thought they fixed in 4.5.x is resurfacing in 5.0.x:

------- Comment  #10 From tech 2008-10-06 03:44:08  -------

this bug seems to have started happening intermittently on my 5.04 rhel_x86
installation it hangs the server so i have to reboot

Every time I travel to Oklahoma I am asked “are you going out to the midwest?” I generally correct the speaker but could never really put my finger on how to categorize it. It’s not the midwest: the accents have a twang that hints at southern. It’s not the South: no sweet tea. It’s not the West: they’re not earthy enough.

I was writing an old friend this week when it dawned on me: Oklahoma is prairie meets southern hospitality with no sweet tea and less soul food.

If you have been to the South proper (Mississippi, Tennessee, rural Georgia) you know they both love their sweet tea and distrust those that don’t drink it.. or worse those that suggest (as I do) that it’s as simple as simply adding sugar to warm tea.. which it is but I digress. This doesn’t happen in Oklahoma. They do however serve unsweet tea absolutely everywhere in Oklahoma.

You won’t get comfort food in Oklahoma but you do get an excess of beef. Oklahoma City is the home of the “World’s Largest Stockyards.” And they do love their beef. We’re talking about restaurants that serve chicken so there’s an option for vegetarians.

Oklahoma also has some intense open spaces. For instalnce turnpike exits where the closest towns are 25 miles in either direction and the next exit is 30+ miles. This is fine until you find yourself there at 7:30 in the morning on a motorcycle and realize your fuel light is on. The woman at the toll booth was at least very nice.

Why not go down to DC?
It’s late notice but it’s a good event by smart people. Tell them I sent you.

tap, tap.. is this thing on?