Hello,
I've discovered a bug in the autofs daemon recently, and I sent a bug report
to debian about it. Because I haven't heard anything from them about this
(IMO quite severe) bug, I'm sending this message...
The complete bug report can be found on the following URL:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=98381
I'll cut'n'paste the man text into this message:
---
Package: autofs
Version: 3.1.4-9
Severity: grave
I have all my DOS drives managed by autofs. When I make sure /dos/c is
mounted (which can be done by any user with 'ls /dos/c') the drive is
mounted successfully. Then I umount it as root.
Then, any user can do 'mkdir /dos/c' and the autofs daemon will go crazy and
the /dos partition is defunct, or at least during the first 75 seconds. It's
very easy to reproduce on my system, although I don't know about other
systems. And it might be a 2.4.4-ac9 kernel bug as well, but I think it's
not, because the automount process halts at the moment it tries to do
'mkdir /dos/c' itself, according to strace:
[pid 3521] mkdir("/dos/c", 0555 <unfinished ...>
Only as soon as the 'any user' terminates the mkdir process, the autofs
daemon returns to normal state again. I think the problem does/should not
occur if the partition isn't umounted manually, but I haven't tested that.
What I can say is that the first step (mount and manual umount) is
necessary to reproduce the bug.
---
Greetings,
Wilmer van der Gaast.
