autofs doesn't start on boottime and "ghost" option is being ingnored on HP machines

[firebird]

hi folks!

I have the problem that autofs just doesn't start during system startup.
There is no what so ever error message in none of the logs and I can start it without any problems with "/etc/init.d/autofs start".
Autofs has a link in /etc/rc[0-6|S].d, I have tried to put those entries to way higher values than ldap and networking but to no effect.

This problem ONLY occurs on Hewlett Packard machines, i.e dx2400 and dc7900.
Our Fuji-Siemens Workstations f.ex. have exactly the same setup and there it works just fine.

Further (also only on the HP machines) the "ghost" option is completely being ignored; as far as i understand this option the folders that are supposed to be mounted should be shown but only mounted on access.
They do NOT show, but they are there, including content if you access them f.ex with ls -l /backup/office, but ONLY if you use the full path. ls -l /backup returns "total 0"

Please let me know what further information you want me to provide in order to be able to solve this!

Thanks in advance, your's faithfully,
firebug

[firebird (sysadmin-dk-compmath-deactivatedaccount)]

anybody PLEASE?

This problem still persists, and as far as i understand now after some research it might have to do with the "speedup" of the boot process that has been implemented in Jaunty?

It'd be really nice if someone could take notice pls, as said before i am willing to provide what ever information you guys require or to run some routines if you wish me to.

Thanks and greetings, firebug

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Hi,

I was wondering if you were still having this problem?

Regards
chuck

[firebird (sysadmin-dk-compmath-deactivatedaccount)]

Hi Chuck!

Yes, unfortunately nothing has changed so far, problem still persists...

Faithfully,
firebug

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Thanks for the response, which versions of Ubuntu are these machines are using. Also are they using dhcp or static ips?

Thanks
chuck

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Also there seems to be two bugs here. Can you open a second bug for the ghost issue?

Thanks
chuck

[firebird (sysadmin-dk-compmath-deactivatedaccount)]

Hi Chuck!

All of these machines run Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 and are configured to use dhcp ips where the lease is configured to never expire and the machines also have a reserved ip, meaning always the same one.
So from a technical point of view it is dhcp but practically the ips are static...

@ghost option, basically yes, but you believe that the ghost problem won't go away when the autofs problem is fixed?

thanks and your's, firebug

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Lucid Lynx. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[firebird (sysadmin-dk-compmath-deactivatedaccount)]

Dear Chuck!

As I am still interested in finding a solution to this I would very much like to help you in solving this, but unfortunately I cannot quite understand how I am supposed to reproduce he failure with a live cd as the malfunction occurs during startup and I seriously don't want to engineer a live cd in order to execute autofs and ldap commands during startup...
As described above there is no problem if you do it manually after startup...
Any suggestions on that?
Yours, Firebug

[firebird (sysadmin-dk-compmath-deactivatedaccount)]

Dear Chuck!

Here's what i can do for you:
As mentioned above i put a line "/etc/init.d/autofs start" into /etc/rc.local but this did not work anymore since some updates last week, so I put a "echo 'ifconfig` >> /tmp/bla.txt infront of that line and i saw from that that the ethernet interface did not have an ip-address at that time, of course the ldap communication then does not work so good...
As I haven't concerned myself with upstart yet I cannot tell how to solve this properly, however I have a quick and dirty solution to this, I put the following line into /etc/rc.local;

(while [ ! -f /var/run/autofs/_home.pid ]; do /etc/init.d/autofs start; sleep 10; done) &

As you can see this while-loop tests if the pid-file for autofs exists and if not it keeps trying to start it in 10 seconds steps.
This does work but a proper solution would of course be preferable, so I hope you can get this upstart messup fixed somehow...:)
Your's, firebug