[Bug 964207] Re: Dependency loops due to ANDed start conditions leave system unbootable

[Steve Langasek]

On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 12:44:21PM -0000, Nikolaus Rath wrote:
> Things aren't quite that simple. /home is an NFS mount transported over
> VPN, and mountall generally dosn't mount it (presumably because the VPN
> isn't up quickly enough).

Please show the /etc/fstab entry for this filesystem.  The default behavior
is that mountall will wait around until all network filesystems can be
mounted, and it will retry mounting them each time it sees a network
connection come up.  And the 'filesystem' event is not emitted until all
local and remote filesystems have been mounted - unless particular mount
options have been specified that would cause that filesystem to be skipped.

> It nevertheless happily emits the "filesystem" event.  We tried solving
> the problem by adding the explicit "mounted" event and starting a third
> mountall run.  So is the real problem here that mountall emits
> "filesystem" even if it didn't mount all of them?

Yes.  It's possible this is a bug in mountall, but I suspect you may have a
buggy mount option configured in /etc/fstab.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/964207

Title:
  Dependency loops due to ANDed start conditions leave system unbootable

Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in “upstart” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  If /home is mounted on a separate partition, and the gdm start
  condition in /etc/init/gdm.conf is modified to include "mounted
  MOUNTPOINT=/home" as follows:

  start on (filesystem
            and mounted MOUNTPOINT=/home
            and started dbus
            and (drm-device-added card0 PRIMARY_DEVICE_FOR_DISPLAY=1
                 or stopped udevtrigger))

  then a lucid system will no longer boot. It seems that in this case
  the mountall process is waiting for input from upstart, but upstart is
  not sending anything. Thus, the required muntall events are not
  emitted and the system refuses to boot.

  The problem can be worked around by manually starting another mountall
  instance while the first instance is hanging.

  I have attached the --verbose output of the first and second mountall, as
  well as an strace output.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
  Package: mountall 2.15.3
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-17.30~lucid1-server 3.0.22
  Uname: Linux 3.0.0-17-server x86_64
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Sat Mar 24 18:45:46 2012
  ProcEnviron:
   PATH=(custom, user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: mountall

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