Odd Global .lockfile problem

[Laura Brody]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:42:35 -0700, Silas Martinez <silasm at gmail.com> wrote:

> Laura Brody wrote:
> ....
>>      Your lockfile issues appear to be self-inflicted.
>>      What you are doing is TOTALLY not recommended. Turn off
>> this cron job, get everyone out of the system, delete all of
>> the lockfiles
[...]
>
> Thanks for the input, Laura. Here is the thing - users are getting locked out of files that have an empty .lockfile in them.

	What is an empty lockfile? Please describe.

	What is the exact error message when the problem
occurs?

> It doesn't appear to be a simple permissions issue - I've verified permissions, and had filepro do the same.

	Do you mean that you ran the setperms script?

> I've verified that it isn't a case of someone else using the file - there are no users on the system except myself, as root, checking the issue (not running any filepro apps), and the single user experiencing the problem which I had logged in to troubleshoot. I verified that there were no stale logins, `ps aux` revealed only the expected user's single session.

	All good things to check for...

> The users are aware of the 'how not to log out' issues, and are quite careful to not just randomly exit out of the ssh session, instead 'x'ing out to a shell prompt, and then using ctrl+d or typing exit.

	You trained them right from the begining - excellent!

> I've disabled the cron job again, and will check the contents of any and all lockfiles again - but I'll note that I had checked this before, and indeed .lockfile for the file the user was unsuccessfully trying to access was empty.

	Please don't just check them. Get everyone out, then delete
the lockfiles for all filePro files. BTW, how do you delete the
lockfiles? ddir? rm .lockfile? some other method?

> I feel like a filepro noob all over again .... *sigh* Then again, it has been nearly a year since I last had to administer any filepro based system.

	Very, very few people know everything that they need to
know off the top of their heads. Don't feel bad. Problems
crop up all the time for an admin, that's why they pay you
the (not so <g>) big bucks!

-- 
Laura Brody, Publisher of the filePro Developer's Journal
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