Scalix-10 lost license & then lost mailbox with ldapsync

[dave-wilson]

Hi guys and girls,

I've been using Scalix for some time and it's an awesome product, however at one of my clients who are running a licensed version of Scalix 10 on Suse Linux 10; I've run into an interesting problem which I suspect has something to do with the syncing between OpenLDAP and Scalix. I've looked all over the web and forums but can't find an answer to my problem:

One of my 18 "Full" (unlimited class) Scalix users using Outlook suddenly picked up the "No license for this client" type of error message in their Outlook about 2 weeks ago. I then upgraded their account to a "full" account again using 'ommodu [user] --class full'. This user then logged in again using Outlook and discovered that all their email had disappeared.

To me it seemed that their internal Scalix user ID had changed and that they now had a new "empty" mailbox ?
Since this user picked up this problem, another user has now experienced the same problem today.
Perhaps their User Folder has changed somehow ?
'omshowu' just show's the path of the current (empty) mail folder.
'omscan' does not find any errors and there's nothing of interest shown in the output of 'omshowlog'.

Is there anything I can do to find out where the users' mailbox has gone to, and how I can get their mail back ?

Any ideas how I can avoid this in future ?

Thanks in advance ! Keep up the awesome work. You guys rock !

Kind regards
David Wilson

[burhankhalid]

I suggest that since your customer has a license that you contact scalix support directly and they will help you promptly :)

[dave-wilson]

Thanks for your reply burhankhalid.

Oops ! Sorry.....this client of mine is running the community edition. My mistake.

Any ideas what I can try ?

[ScalixSupport]

Is it possible that two omldapsyncs were run simultaneously? We found that there is a bug in omldapsync that can cause a deletion if this is the case. The subsequent run of omldapsync would add the user back. The fact that the system id changed would indicate that there was an add and delete as a ommodu does not change that value.

You can avoid deletes from omldapsync by modifying your sync.cfg. Specifically:

# IM_DELETE_MAILBOX: whether sync of mailbox delete will be applied to Scalix
# NOTE: set to "FALSE" to keep the mailbox and handle the deletion manually
IM_DELETE_MAILBOX=TRUE

Scalix 11 will have a fix to this bug.

Regards,
Don

[dave-wilson]

Thanks ScalixSupport.

Yes - It is possible that omldapsync may have been run simultaneously. Though I don't think this is the case.

Perhaps there was something on the OpenLDAP side that caused all this. Perhaps some LDAP corruption ? I've checked the OpenLDAP side and the unix uids, gids names etc. are all the same as they were before this all went wrong.
Does Scalix somehow use other details to see if users in OpenLDAP have been modified ?


At the moment I have "IM_DELETE_MAILBOX=false" - surely this means that my 'missing' mailboxes are still there ?
Is there any way for me to track down and figure out where the old mailbox is and modify the current user to use the old mailbox ?

Would "IM_DELETE_MAILBOX=true" be more dangerous than 'false' as this WOULD delete the mailbox for missing deleted OpenLDAP users ?

Thanks for all your help so far. It's really appreciated.

[nwilson]

with regards to Dave's last post, are the mailboxes still there, or have they been deleted?

I've just seen the exact same problem on another server, and a couple users have lost vital email, is there a way to "link the users" with their mailboxes again or is their mail gone?

Would a disk recovery recover this type of thing, as this is a major problem and the users have extremely vital info in the mailboxes?

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated!

[florian]

Well, if the mailboxes are still there, you would see them in the Scalix Admin Console or using the omshowu command line tool.

You can also find evidence of omldapsync deleting users by checking the logfiles.

Cheers,
Florian.

[nwilson]

Hi Florian, and thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately the users don't show up at all using omshowu or in the SAC.

Can't find evidence of the users being deleted, and apparently ldapsync was set to not delete ?

Sorry haven't been the person testing this, so I'm just going by what i've been told.

Anything else we can test/break?

[florian]

well, if they don't show up in omshowu, I must assume they are gone.

You could find some evidence in sync.log (look for "delete"), in the caa log (for SAC as omldapsync works through the SAC infrastructure) or in res log (for RES which acts as an agent)

I think most important is to get back online for you and then to find what happened so that we can make sure it doesn't happen again.

Florian.