[Bug 525154] Re: mountall for /var races with rpc.statd

[Christian Reis]

Clint, similarly to Janusz I see these exact same issues on my Natty
NFS-root system, even when running with the pristing statd* *portmap*
init configuration files. I don't quite understand enough about upstart
to say what's wrong yet.

I just spent an afternoon chasing this down and am pretty sure a bug
still remains somewhere, though I'm finding it hard to see where without
complete event logging or an infinite kernel scrollback buffer.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/525154

Title:
  mountall for /var races with rpc.statd

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