Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 17 Apr 2001 13:34:34 +0100 (BST)
From:      Gavin Atkinson <gavin@ury.york.ac.uk>
To:        Stijn Hoop <stijn@win.tue.nl>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: delayed security email?
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0104171257160.2291-100000@ury.york.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: <20010417134355.A58593@pcwin002.win.tue.nl>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Stijn Hoop wrote:

> I recently installed a new machine for testing NFS mounts. Things worked
> great, so I went to attend to other things. I tested the NFS mounts with
> my work machine as the server. Now I regularly upgrade my work machine, so it
> gets reboot every couple of days. I forgot that the client still had
> /usr/ports (and only /usr/ports) mounted from my work machine, so I didn't
> unmount that first. In fact, I failed to look at the client for a few days.
> What I didn't notice at first was that the client failed to report its
> security status from then on. I didn't get any daily mail from that machine
> anymore.
[snip]
> Now, I know for sure that I only had /usr/ports mounted during the time.
> And I think it's very strange that the daily security check would fail
> to mail me when a mount of /usr/ports is failing. Can anyone explain
> why this would happen? I don't think the security mail should be delayed
> for a reason like this.

It's not only a -STABLE prooblem - I have experienced the same thing on
4.1-RELEASE a few days ago. I have two linux machines which export NFS
shares and are mounted on the 4.1 box. These are physically seperate, and
a power supply failure meant that one of the two Linux boxes died, and
failed to come back up. My security mails on the FreeBSD machine stopped,
which was what alerted me to the problem.

It turns out that when this happened, anything trying to access anything
about the mounts hung, and for some reason it wouldn't time out.
periodic/daily will hang when it's looking for setuid files, because it
attempts to traverse the mounted filesystems. df(1) will hang as it looks
at the mounts. an ls(1) of the directory containing their mountpoints will
also hang. umount(8) will hang, even with the -f (force) flag. These
processed cannot be killed, and even kill -9 will not help. I had to
restart my server (losing my large uptime :) as there was nothing else to
do.

Gavin


--
  Life makes more sense when you realise that most other things don't.
 - - Gavin Atkinson  -  Head Of Computing  -  University Radio York - -




To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.BSF.4.21.0104171257160.2291-100000>