gromox mailbox maintenance / repair script

ozy

I'm developping a gromox maintenance script since 2024 in order to resolve various grommunio mailbox issues.
The script allows to:

check / repair mailbox structure (via gromox-mbck)
check / repair mailbox exchange database (via sqlite3)
check / regenerate midb databases (via gromox-mkmidb, thanks to @WalterH for his documentation about midb)
cleanup mailboxes

So far, I've been running it from time to time to service a couple of small servers which I have since 2023, without any (known) data loss.

The mailbox cleaning works like gromox-cleaner, but the later stops running through all mailboxes on any single mailbox issue.
The repair operations take the necessary steps to stop/restart gromox services before doing actual repairs in order to guarantee coherent data.
The midb regeneration only prepares an empty midb database, so next time user connects via pop3/imap, the sync process will happen. This is a design choice to avoid unnecessary disk space loss. Actual data regeneration can be triggered as suggested by @WalterH here.
Regenerating empty midb databases is especially useful after a successful migration via imapsync, where new users would only use exchange MAPI/EWS/ActiveSync services, but disk space would still be used by midb.

I'd be glad to get some reviews / feedback, script is available here

crpb

To not leave you totaly hanging here.

repair_sql

Probably to unawareness i only ever "repaired" an exmdb by using one from an backup but it wasn't really often that i had to use it 🙈 and at least for Mails anything is usually in already archived so at least those weren't lost in the process. Anyhow, if i (hopefully not) have the need again i will certainly try it.

repair_midb

TIL that mkmidb --integrity check 😛
I always used my midb_repair.py script (from the thread you mentioned) when imap archiving got stuck in either not being able to read some folder or it even got so bad that it couldn't access anything anymore via imap. Luckily these kinda problems are not happening that often anymore in my couple systems.

cleanup

Here i'm using (for at least the past 6 months or so) a script walter wrote which does a bit more in terms of cleaning. There are some things i currently wanted to improve in terms of how the systemd.units are created and whatnot but in general it works pretty well. (but didn't really had the time to even begin with it :<)

Maybe we should put all the ideas into one thingy for that part instead? But i think g_cleaner already has all those thingies (purge-{softdelete,datafiles} + vacuum). With that you can/should also disable the gromox-cleaner.units as it handles those two purges' anyway.

repair_mbox

I remember when i stumbled over that tool how many problems it still could find back then and it even was a bit buggy iirc. Do you still have issues here on occasion? I can't say i had any and just checked over a couple of servers where everything was good. But still, good to have at some place. As i'm a oneliner i often enough just wrote those on the fly or had them in the history ^_^. So i never scribbled something down for that 🙈

ozy

@crpb I appreciate the response to not "leave me totaly hanging here" 😉

I do run a couple of small servers, of which some date back to 2023. I didn't had problems often, until I ran into a bigger VM problem involving qemu-kvm cache handling which only bit me on OpenSUSE (https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/17669#issuecomment-4659864075)
Since I had a couple of segaults on my Grommunio servers, I expected things to be messed up, hence I worked on this script in order to make sure I don't run into bigger problems later.
Script found errors while running repair_mbox and repair_sql.

The cleanup part could indeed be removed in favor of Walter's script which seems quite more complete.

The neat part is finding which MIDB files are stale and remove them with --purge-midb-old.
Since I did some imapsync migrations on start, I actually kept midb files for years without needing them, since I only do MAPI/Activesync.

Anyway, hope the script might help people.
I opened a PR at gromox, but didn't get any answers, and I'm not really sure if that tool should go there anyway.

Cheers.

WalterH

The midb can be resynced with this command: gromox-mbop -u <MAILADDRESS> sync-midb
For IMAP you must manually install the current devel. version to get IMAP4rev2 functionality.