Unmounting File Systems (hang)

[booman]

First a little story...
Remember when I did the "Mack Truck" mod for my buddies at Intel?
Well, I got a lot of goodies as payment for my artistic work.
One of those happend to be 2 Intel 10/100/1000 XT Gigabit networking cards.
I noticed the box said PCI-X and figured I would keep them just in case.
Recently I have been noticing some lag with my Linux as a game server.
So I pulled that box out again and noticed it says PCI/PCI-X network card.
After 2 years of sitting on the shelf!
I could have been using this card all along.
So, naturally, I popped the card into my Linux, booted and what-do-ya-know. Fedora 8 already had the drivers for it. They may be older drivers, but it works just fine.

I'm all excited about my upgrade and decide to shut it down for the day.
Here is where the problem occurs.
When the list of shutdown processes prints down the screen it stops on Unmounting File Systems
nothing happens. I didn't want to cut the power due to risking corruption, but have no choice.
No worries, apparently most of the services are allready off.
So I boot it back up and try a restart. Same problem
I have done some research and think its related to this new card and SMB connections. Something is still in use and won't unmount.

There are 2 SATA drives in this machine and I created a partition for: boot, root, and home
Thats it. No flash drives or back up drives. No network drives.
So what is hanging up on the unmount?

[Gizmo]

What does your mount command show as being mounted?

By the time you get to the point of unmounting the file systems Samba and the network are both down, so I don't see how that could be your issue.

[booman]

Originally Posted by Gizmo

What does your mount command show as being mounted?

By the time you get to the point of unmounting the file systems Samba and the network are both down, so I don't see how that could be your issue.

mount command?
I'll look up what command I need to see current mounts.
Would it help if I took a photo of the shutdown process?

[Gizmo]

Just type

mount

and it should give you a list of all mounted file systems, and their mount points.

Would it help if I took a photo of the shutdown process?

I don't know if it will help, but it can't hurt.

[booman]

gee, just "mount"
I"m dumb, I didn't even think the obvious.

I thought you were asking me to try a "mount" code.... instead of using the actually words "mount".
Ok I'll do both tonight and get back to you

[Gizmo]

man mount

Lots of useful info in there, although it can be somewhat confusing as well.

[booman]

of course, the manual. thanks Gizmo

[Gizmo]

Dude, I've been living in this stuff every day for a while now, and I still learn new stuff that others are like "You didn't know that?".

Don't feel bad about not knowing. We learn by asking questions.

[booman]

Very true. I usually look up questions so I don't have to look like an idiot, but I blew it this time.

[booman]

I booted up tonight and have more problems.
I knew I shouldn't mess with updates and changing things!

Everything boots as normal up to the login screen. I login as root and for a second the wallpaper shows and then the screen goes white. Only a mouse pointer. Thats it!
What the heck????

here is the mount:
/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /devpts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620
/dev/sda3 on /home type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sdb1 on /backup type ext3 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)

I don't know what most of this means except the /home and /backup
I formatted those as ext3 as separate partitions to keep my files and backups separated from the operating system.

[booman]

ok, here is some more....
the white screen is only when I log in as admin
I tried logging in as a limited user and everything works fine (supposedly)
I also tried "umount" on all the mounts that would let me.
some say "device is busy"
then, guess what?
It shutdown just fine.

So what do I do to make sure Fedora 8 is properly unmounting the devices on its own?
And what is with the stinking white screen on the admin account?

[Gizmo]

Ok, think about this very carefully before you answer:

Have you EVER been able to login as root with Fedora? The reason I ask is because, so far as I can recall, you can't login to a desktop as root on Fedora (but I could be wrong).

As for the rest, it could be that you were having some issues that got cleared up by an automatic fsck on a reboot.

[booman]

hmm, thats easy...
I always login as root.
since my Linux server is really only a desktop in a local area network and never on the internet. it doesn't bother me at all to login as root.
This was the first time in a year or so that I have logged in as a user.

Maybe the update fixed something but also broke something else.
I also didn't install all the updates.
Should I try that too?

how much would it hurt to try the newest Fedora?
will it mess up all my existing configurations?

[Gizmo]

Moving from 8 to 13 is a complete reinstall.

AFAIK, 8 isn't even supported any more, so I have no idea what updates you could have gotten unless they were from alternative repos.

What video drivers are you using? (Wait a sec, you said it works for regular users, so I don't see how it could be the video drivers. Hmm.....)

[ThunderRd]

Might be a goodd idea to boot from a live cd and run fsck on those file systems. See if you get any disk errors. If not, boot the OS again and see if it unmounts after that.

[booman]

Ok, I'll try booting again.
its strange that I can manually umount the drives and it shuts down fine.

I'll try the live-disc as a last resort.
I can still login to the shell and use it.
I'm sure fsck will work on the shell right?

[Gizmo]

yes fsck will work with the shell

[ThunderRd]

Originally Posted by booman

Ok, I'll try booting again.
its strange that I can manually umount the drives and it shuts down fine.

I'll try the live-disc as a last resort.
I can still login to the shell and use it.
I'm sure fsck will work on the shell right?

No matter what you do, you can't run fsck on a file system that is mounted. The live disk is the only way that I know of to run fsck on / unless you can dual boot to a different OS install.

Gizmo will correct me if I'm wrong...

[Gizmo]

You're correct TR, you can't run fsck on a mounted file system. Most versions will give you a nasty warning to that effect if you try.

[Kaitain]

/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /devpts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620
/dev/sda3 on /home type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sdb1 on /backup type ext3 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)

Just out of curiosity, which of these mounts allowed you to umount as a normal user, which required root privilege and which were busy when attempting to umount?

In addition, what do you normally have start up automatically with your system (e.g. game servers, cron jobs etc)?

Reason I ask is that faulty file systems don't normally cause "device busy" errors on umounting, but misbehaving applications do. The old SMB kernel module with old versions of Samba were especially prone to leaving a zombie process on exit that prevented their share from being unmounted.