Cyrus/Postfix followup

[Jonathan Hutchins]

It appears that there was a cascade of problems on this.

One Friday evening, our file/mail/fax server locked up, and when I rebooted it 
the USB modems didn't come on line.  Eventually I managed to unplug the 
serial adapter and restart the hotplug and usb drivers in the right order, 
and that started working, but a day or so later they told me they still 
weren't getting any faxes. 

I went through a few daily checks to make sure I was getting "Running and 
idle" from faxstat, and it eventually cascaded that the faxes were being 
received just find, but were not beign delivered.

First error was that mysql had been removed in a clean-up attempt, because the 
MySQL daemon wasn't even running.  It turns out that Cyrus (or was it 
postfix?) was depending on it, but there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to 
determine specific dependencies of an installed package in Gentoo right now.

Once that was working and Cyrus, Postfix, and Hylafax were all at least 
running, we still had problems.  Logs said that delivery 
to /home/faxes/.maildir/tmp...etc. wasn't working.

Bill C. helped me find the "mailbox_transport = cyrus" option in main.cf, 
which had aparently been overwritten by an update which I didn't catch with 
etc-update.

Next cascading error was that /cyrus/bin/deliver wasn't found.  For some 
reason, Gentoo was unable to determine where Gentoo had installed the cyrus 
binaries, and the postfix master.cf file needed to be updated with the actual 
path (/usr/lib/cyrus...).

Complicating this was that this morning, when I actually sat down to put the 
time in to work the problem all the way through instead of just doing trivial 
checks, our Business Class RoadRunner connection started intermittently 
dropping packets, then started bungee jumping up and down.  40% packet loss 
makes it pretty hard to do a coherent diagnostic, but I think it's working 
all the way through now.

The reason this was so complex to solve is that I kept doing little system 
diagnostics of the aparent immediate problem, like checking the modes with 
faxstat, but not doing an all-the-way-through trace to make sure that all the 
pieces were working.  With the usb hub, cyrix, and postfix all having 
problems, it wasn't untill I walked a message all the way through the system 
that I solved it all.

Thanks for the help!