Cyrus Squat File Problem
If you’re getting the following (non-)error in your log files (/var/log/mail.log), then there’s a quick way to fix it if you’re not interested in ignoring it:
Feb 21 13:57:53 zivi cyrus/imaps[4648]: SQUAT failed to open index file
Feb 21 13:57:53 zivi cyrus/imaps[4648]: SQUAT failed
The error is caused by a user doing a search within a mailbox, and a squatter file (aka a search index) is not available. Fix this by running the following as your cyrus user (typically ‘cyrus’):
#> squatter -r user.username
If you’re doing a tail -f of /var/log/mail.log you’ll see the indexes being created.
Et voila – no more errors:
Feb 21 14:10:11 zivi cyrus/imaps[5073]: SQUAT returned 277 messages
If you want to take it a step further, you can automate this by creating a cronjob. Or if you’re using a standard Cyrus installation, the last few lines of your /etc/cyrus.conf will have some useful settings commented out that will allow Cyrus to schedule the SQUAT operations automatically:
# reindex changed mailboxes (fulltext) approximately every other hour
#squatter_1 cmd=”/usr/bin/nice -n 19 /usr/sbin/squatter -s” period=120
# reindex all mailboxes (fulltext) daily
#squatter_a cmd=”/usr/sbin/squatter” at=0517
As hinted at the beginning of this entry, this is a sort of non-error in as much as it can be safely ignored, and squat indexes need only be created if their is an advantage to doing so (that is, searches are often carried out).