==> Regarding Re: [autofs] [PATCH] autofs 4.1.4 no-unlink patch; Ian Kent 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> adds:

raven> On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, Chris Feist wrote:
>> Ian,
>> 
>> We've been hearing some reports of autofs removing entire home
>> directories when mounts expire.  It appears that this could be some sort
>> of race condition in the walk_tree code, where when the function starts
>> the directory is unmounted and then autofs unlinks files in the the
>> directory that is supposed to be umounted.  I've attached a patch to the
>> rm_unwanted_fn which adds some additional checks before we unlink
>> anything, and it prevents autofs from unlinking files (since I'm pretty
>> sure that autofs never creates a regular file).  Let me know what you
>> think.

raven> Yes. There doesn't seem to be enough checking and the !S_ISLNK
raven> doesn't look quite right. Your right, the only objects in the autofs
raven> filesystem are directories and symlinks.

raven> A mount happening during an expire might lead to this. But it
raven> shouldn't be able to happen due to the nature of the state machine.

raven> I'll have to keep looking.

Right, it shouldn't be able to happen, I agree.  However, we've seen 2
occurrences of this in the wild.  Even if/when we fix this problem
properly, I would lobby to put in these extra checks.  They certainly don't
hurt anything, and they make the code more robust.  I certainly wouldn't
like it if autofs deleted all of my files!

-Jeff

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