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

[Steve Langasek]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 07:42:54PM -0000, Andy Hauser wrote:
> #484209

Which is fixed.

> #275451

Which has nothing to do with lucid; the bug report dates back to 2008, is
marked "incomplete" in Debian, and does not discuss /var as a separate
partition.  That's not an actionable bug report; I've closed it now.

> #690401

This is marked as a duplicate of the present bug report, which is fixed!

> Also just having a bind mount to a NFS mount in fstab makes my lucid
> nodes unbootable.

Is that bug #524972 (where the bind mount refers to a path which is a
symlink)?

> All in all I think we fixed/worked around 4 bugs in lucid to get them to
> boot.  All related to the introduction of upstart.  And not all have fixes
> released.

I'm sorry you found this to be the case.  Unfortunately some of the
NFS-related problems were discovered quite late in the Lucid cycle, and some
of these bugs took quite some time to untangle once identified.  But we do
take responsibility for all such critical bugs, which is precisely why I'm
checking to see if there are any such bugs that aren't on our radar.

So far, it doesn't appear that there are.

-- 
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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