[SOLVED] Atril phoning home?

sundialsvcs · 04-19-2017, 08:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by taylorkh

It looks like this was a red herring. Autofs is the source of the issue. I disabled my nfs automount points, rebooted the PC and Atril will now open the offending pdf faster than a speeding bullet.

Perhaps I need to connect to my servers with Samba instead of nfs. That would suck but it could not be much worse.

NFS is fine, as long as it's NFSv4, but why bother with auto-mounting? Just list them in fstab and mount 'em when you need 'em, or specify that they should be mounted at boot time. There is an overhead associated with mounting a share for the first time, and, I think, very little benefit in "mount on demand."

taylorkh · 04-19-2017, 09:42 AM

Thanks sundialsvcs,

Perhaps we can use this thread to get to the real root cause of my Atril issue. Here is the setup. I have three "servers" which are actually just bulk data storage for backup/archive purposes. In a few years a flash drive will probably hold 100 TB and I would not need a bunch of rotating rust. In the mean time, however... I do not normally have these boxes on-line. For example, I will bring up server "taylor14" when I need to save my monthly Clonezilla shapshots or to retrieve a virtual machine backup image or something like that. The server has 4 drives mirrored (manually) two by two. Here is what I would mount with autofs

Code:

data14.1 -rw taylor14:/media/data14.1a
data14.2 -rw taylor14:/media/data14.2a

This will produce mount points under /nfs for the "a" drives in the server. After copying data to the server I manually mirror the new files to the "b" drives.

If I add the mounts to /etc/fstab on the PC and the server is not on-line when I boot the PC I believe it will hang unless I add "nofail". If I then bring up the server and issue "sudo mount -a" I would expect the two mounts to happen. If I then shut down the server without unmounting the nfs exports first... I would expect all sorts of mischief on the PC - as I have experienced when doing the mount/umount process with scripts and forgetting to run the umount script before taking the server down.

Perhaps I have missed something. How do I

Quote:

list them in fstab and mount 'em when you need 'em

? And how do I umount 'em when I don't need 'em??

Thanks again,

Ken

sundialsvcs · 04-19-2017, 05:57 PM

The advantage(?) of autofs is that it will mount the devices for you ... avoiding the need to "exercise rootly privileges" to get the job done. However, I have never cared for it – for the very same reasons that you have just encountered. It introduces "awkward delays," and with questionable benefit. (And, it can be "automatically triggered," albeit "in error," as you have also seen.)

In your case, I'd define the mounts in your fstab but not specify that they auto-mount. You then would have to sudo mount the drives before using them, and sudo umount them when they were no longer required. Yeah, a couple extra human-deliberate steps. But you know when you do, and when you don't, need those network resources. Your PDF-reader doesn't.

taylorkh · 04-19-2017, 06:35 PM

At the moment I have created two scripts for each server. The mount script says

Code:

#!/bin/bash

sudo mount taylor14:/media/data14.1a /data/_servers/data14.1
sudo mount taylor14:/media/data14.1b /data/_servers/data14.2

echo mounting finished
sleep 10
exit

and the unmount script

Code:

#!/bin/bash

sudo umount --force -vvv /data/_servers/data14.1
sudo umount --force -vvv /data/_servers/data14.2

echo un-mounting finished
sleep 10
exit

I have configured visudo to allow my account to mount and umount NOPASSWORD. That is reasonably painless. It work although I have not accidentally shut down a server while mounted to see what will happen. It often locked things up on CentOS 6.

In looking at how to compose an fstab line I see discussion of the "soft" option. I wonder if that would help with autofs? I still do not see how to specify the mount point when I expect the server to be down when the PC is booted.

Ken