Re: Trying to solve file lock problem with /etc/sudoers

[Richard Braun]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 02:44:36AM -0500, Peter Baumgarten wrote:
> I'm trying to be a hurd developer by jumping straight in and trying to
> tackle a bug. This may not be a hurd bug, but I only see it with the
> hurd version of sudo. I am trying to figure out why I get this message
> "visudo: /etc/sudoers busy, try again later" when I run visudo as root.
> I suspect something has a file lock on /etc/sudoers. I would normally
> use lsof to see what processes have a lock on a file, but apparently
> lsof is not available for hurd. When I say not available I mean not
> installed by default on the debian hurd qemu image and not available in
> the debian hurd repos. Does anyone know what tools are available to me
> to see what has a lock on file or what processes are using a file on?

To everyone who's trying to be a free software contributor, this is the
right (or at least recommended) approach.

The Hurd is a distributed system, and it's not straightforward to come
up with tools like lsof. The closest one is probably portinfo, but it
won't give you as much information. The issue is known, although I'm
not familiar with the details. You need to understand the general
architecture of the Hurd, and then dig in libdiskfs/libfshelp and the
ext2fs translator, I suppose. It is definitely a Hurd bug, which may
require development (i.e. it may be a feature missing, not a mere bug).

Unless I'm mistaken, the issue is described on the wiki [1].

-- 
Richard Braun

[1] http://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/open_issues/file_locking/