Hi,

I installed a Red Hat Enterprise Edition WS on my system... I gave 1GB for /var on my 40GB hard drive... and I selected the Mail server package while installation since I wanted to play around with sendmail.

But, right from the first shutdown, whenever I halt/reboot my system, I get a message similar to:
"/var: Unable to unmount filesystem ..." It checks for 3 times and fails and continues rebooting / halting...

I thought there might be some problem with my installation/machine, and tried it again... and also in a different machine. I still get the same error... I read online that if I put a 5-10 second delay in /etc/init.d/halt (just before it tries to umount the /var system), I can correct this... But it did not work...

One more strange thing - whenever I shutdown/reboot my system within a few minutes of booting, I dont get any error and all filesystems are unmounted properly... Only after working on something for sometime and then i reboot/shutdown, I get this error...

Can you please help me what's worng with it and how do I correct it?

Thanks a lot,
Manudath

I don't think you did something wrong.
Just start your Computer, let it run 5/10 min (to get the error at halt)

And before halting the system, try to umount /var as root.

Now check if you get the same error.

If the reply is YES, its good !
try that:
fuser -v /var

will return what process ID is in use of that directory. Its probably your mail deamon/client that check your mailbox every 10 mins, and use /var/spool/mail to put new received messages. But I'm tired, so do not read this

Hi,

I tried the unmounting /var before shutting down and it gave the same error:

[root@localhost root]# umount /var
umount: /var: device is busy
[root@localhost root]# fuser -v /var

USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
/var root kernel mount /var
[root@localhost root]#

What can I do now?

Thanks,
Manudath