[Bug 525154] Re: mountall for /var or other nfs mount races with rpc.statd

[Steve Langasek]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 05:38:51PM -0000, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On 11-07-17 04:59 AM, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > Brian, in comment #84 you said that the SRUed package fixed the issue
> > for you, but in your latest post you comment that "this bug has existed
> > since Lucid".  Did the updated package fix your issue, or did it not?
> > If it didn't, we should reopen this bug report; up to then, you had
> > certainly given the impression that your bug was fixed.

> Yeah.  I would say that it has.  I guess it must just be all of the
> other problems in Lucid (and beyond) that have not been fixed (i.e. all
> of the bugs related to /var being on it's own filesystem that are still
> open and dangling) that are clouding my judgment in this bug.

Oh.  Can you give me some specific bug numbers there?  I wasn't aware of any
other issues with /var as a separate filesystem, and based on the
architecture I really wouldn't *expect* any bugs not related to NFS.  So if
there are other problems, I'd very much like to know what they are so we can
see about getting them fixed.

-- 
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/525154

Title:
  mountall for /var or other nfs mount races with rpc.statd

Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in “nfs-utils” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “portmap” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released
Status in “mountall” source package in Lucid:
  Invalid
Status in “nfs-utils” source package in Lucid:
  Fix Released
Status in “portmap” source package in Lucid:
  Fix Released
Status in “mountall” source package in Maverick:
  Invalid
Status in “nfs-utils” source package in Maverick:
  Fix Released
Status in “portmap” source package in Maverick:
  Fix Released
Status in “mountall” source package in Natty:
  Invalid
Status in “nfs-utils” source package in Natty:
  Fix Released
Status in “portmap” source package in Natty:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  If one has /var (or /var/lib or /var/lib/nfs for that matter) on its
  own filesystem the statd.conf start races with the mounting of /var as
  rpc.statd needs /var/lib/nfs to be available in order to work.

  I am sure this is not the only occurrence of this type of problem.

  A knee-jerk solution is to simply spin in statd.conf waiting for
  /var/lib/nfs to be available, but polling sucks, especially for
  something like upstart whose whole purpose is to be an event driven
  action manager.

  SRU justification: NFS mounts do not start reliably on boot in lucid
  and maverick (depending on the filesystem layout of the client system)
  due to race conditions in the startup of statd.  This should be fixed
  so users of the latest LTS can make reliable use of NFS.

  Regression potential:  Some systems may fail to mount NFS filesystems
  at boot time that didn't fail before.  Some systems may hang at boot.
  Some systems may hang while upgrading the packages (this version or in
  a future SRU).  I believe the natty update adequately guards against
  all of these possibilities, but the risk is there.

  TEST CASE:
  1. Configure a system with /var as a separate partition.
  2. Add one or more mounts of type 'nfs' to /etc/fstab.
  3. Boot the system.
  4. Verify whether statd has started (status statd) and whether all NFS filesystems have been mounted.
  5. Repeat 3-4 until the race condition is triggered.
  6. Upgrade to the new version of portmap and nfs-common from -proposed.
  7. Repeat steps 3-4 until satisfied that statd now starts reliably and all non-gss-authenticated NFSv3 filesystems mount correctly at boot time.

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