sendmail starts before rpc.statd and rpc.lockd

[Robert Watson]

On Sat, 7 Jun 2003, David Yeske wrote:

> Jun  8 00:52:33 photon sendmail[293]: h584pRfm000293: SYSERR(root): cannot
> flock(./tfh584pRfm000293, fd=5, type=6, omode=40001, euid=25^C.
> NFS access cache time=2
> Starting statd.
> Starting lockd.
> 
> It looks like sendmail starts before rpc.lockd and rpc.statd?  This will
> cause diskless clients to hang?  This is a nfs server and diskless
> client running 5.1-RELEASE.  I'm running rpc.lockd and rpc.statd on the
> server and the client.  Should rpc.lockd and rpc.statd be started before
> sendmail starts? 

Hmm.  It shouldn't cause diskless clients to hang, or at least, doesn't
for me.  The cause of the error message, however, is exactly as you
surmise -- befpre rpc.lockd, calls to flock() on the NFS file system will
return an error.  Is the hang you're seeing immediately after the
"Starting lockd"?  If you hit Ctrl-T, does it tell you anything useful? 
Note that unless you're running 5.x pretty close to the release, pressing
Ctrl-T while a process is attempting to grab an NFS-backed file lock will
result in a slipped lock and many nasty failure modes.  I disabled signal
delivery to processes while sleeping on an NFS lock as a workaround until
out rpc.lockd addresses the "process aborts the lock request" race, which
isn't handled right now. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories