[Bug 504224] Re: NFS mounts at boot time prevent boot or print spurious errors

[Steve Langasek]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 03:21:33PM -0000, Kat Amsterdam wrote:
> Proof of this bug in a screenshot. I have had my ubuntu customer in a
> panic now twice due to this matter. It happens when the machine has been
> turned off for the night. The next day he starts the machine (the nas
> runs 24/7 but goes into sleep mode), but the nas is still sleeping, so
> it doesn't react right away to the request to mount. The system hangs
> with the message in the screenshot.

This is not the same bug as originally described, despite having
superficially similar symptoms.  Please file a separate bug report for the
problem you're experiencing.

For me, the obvious first question is: why is plymouth exiting before
mountall has finished?  Nothing in the /etc/init/plymouth-stop.conf job
should stop plymouth until the filesystem mounting is finished.  So even if
the mount triggers too early the first time around, plymouth should still be
waiting for mountall-net to trigger and retry the network mount (and you
should never see the error message in normal operation).

The second question is why dbus is being killed with SIGTERM.

Is this screenshot taken after pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete on the console?

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/504224

Title:
  NFS mounts at boot time prevent boot or print spurious errors

Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “mountall” source package in Lucid:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: mountall

  karmic: mountall 1.0

  When mounting NFS shares at boot, the first mount attempt usually
  fails since rpc or portmap are not running, or the network itself is
  not up yet.

  These errors appear although the filesystem will be mounted
  successfully later on, so the user cannot distinguish them from "real"
  mount failures that need intervention by the admin.

  Even worse, when the NFS mounts happen to be for a mountpoint that
  mountall considers essential for boot (like /home), the user is
  dropped to an emergency shell and system refuses to boot.

  A temporary workaround is to add "nobootwait" for the affected
  mountpoints, but this causes the system to continue booting even if
  the mountpoint is not available when the network is set up correctly,
  i.e. if there is a real problem with the NFS server.

  Proposed fix:

  mountall should not try to mount any network file systems when called
  the first time. Only when the network is up and mountall receives
  SIGUSR1 it should try to do so. If this does not work at *that* point,
  mountall should print an error (and stop the boot for essential mount
  points) as before.

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