[vox-tech] Red Hat and Fedora Unmount problem

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Thu 22 Jul 04,  6:51 AM, Lewis Perdue <lperdue at ideaworx.com> said:
> I don't know if this will help LUGOD users, but William and I found an easy 
> solution to an unmount issue that has long plagued both Red Hat and Fedora: 
> namely that the floppy and cdrom sometimes will not unmount and offers a 
> "device busy" error message.
> 
> The problem _may_ be due to fam monitoring the drive's contents, but 
> regardless of that, if you use the -l switch, things work fine:
> 
> umount -l /mnt/yourdrivehere
> 
> This is an annoying time waster so I thot somebody could benefit from the 
> time we already burned up.
> 
> Lewis Perdue
> lperdue at ideaworx.com
> http://www.ideaworx.com

lewis, i'd be careful with that lazy umount.  it may or may not cause
trouble.

next time the problem happens, do this:

   $ ps aux > processes.txt
   $ su
   Passowrd: secret
   # fuser -k /dev/hda1

replace "hda1" with whatever partition you're trying to umount.  fuser
will kill all non "D-type" processes that have file descriptors open on
the filesystem.  It'll print out the PID of the processes that it
killed, and you can grep for them in your "processes.txt" file to see
what the hang-up was.

maybe the hang-up was unimportant, but maybe not.  at the very least
you'll KNOW, beyond a shadow of a doubt, why the filesystem isn't
umounting.

fuser is a resource that anybody who (pretends to) wear a sysadmin hat
should know about.

hth,
pete

-- 
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