homes on NFS: Failed to lock: NFS 4 in Hoary ?

[Pete Goodall]

Johannes Behr wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
>>>I run warty with nis-users. The nis-user
>>>have there homes on (auto-mounted) nfs
>>>devices. Everything works fine but everytime
>>>I try to start a gnome application (e.g. gedit)
>>>I get the following warning multiple times:
>>>
>>>** (gedit:10308): WARNING **: Failed to lock:  No locks available
>>>
>>>The application starts correct after 4-5 seconds.
>>>
>>>Since I get the warning message only for nis-users
>>>with nfs-homes I assume that gnome tries
>>>to lock some files/data on my nfs-dir
>>>
>>>Does anybody know how to fix this problem?
>>
>>I have to admit that I don't know the solution but I might be able to
>>point you in a direction. My understanding is that nfs has incredibly
>>poor locking so you might try upgrading to the new version of nfs (4 I
>>think) which is supposed to have remedied this problem.
> 
> 
> Do I have to change the NFS server or client to NFS 4? There is no NFS 4
> package in warty. Is there a NFS 4 package in Hoary?
> 
> 
>>The other suggestion would be to try a different protocol like SMB
>>which provides proper locking and some security.
> 
> 
> Well. The System runs in a pure Unix environment. Only IRIX, SunOS
> and some Linux workstations. No SMB :(. I don't think I can 
> get our Sys-admin to install smaba on our Solaris server.
> 

As I understand it, Linux has been historically poor at interacting with 
NFS from Unix.  In addition, GNOME does not do well with an NFS mounted 
home dir.

That being said, I think if you enable exclusive locking on the NFS 
server it should work fine.  I think gnome-vfs requires that it be able 
to have a lock on certain files in your home dir.

- Pete


-- 
Pete Goodall <pete at yellowhouse.org>