[pmwiki-users] .flock troubles

Joachim Durchholz jo at durchholz.org
Thu Apr 21 15:04:42 CDT 2005


Hi all,

I just hit a stale .flock issue again. Just adding another data point to 
that nagging problem - hopefully a solution can be found in the end!

Here's what happened:

I got user reports that PmWiki was just sitting there and doing nothing. 
A quick check revealed that this was indeed the case. Calling up any 
page of the net resulted in the browser saying "waiting for <site 
name>", and doing nothing (it didn't even time out).

I moved the wiki.d/ directory to wiki.d.save/ and checked - PmWiki would 
now smoothlessly serve pages. So far so good.

Then I started moving files back to wiki.d/ . All went smoothly, until 
the only remaining file was .flock (which I hadn't moved because I knew 
it would be recreated by PmWiki if needed).

This triggered my curiosity, and I did this:

$ ll wiki.d/.flock wiki.d.old/.flock

and got this:

-rw-rw-rw-  1 web2   www 0 Apr 21 21:22 wiki.d.old/.flock
-rw-rw-r--  1 wwwrun www 0 Apr 21 21:38 wiki.d/.flock

Then I moved .flock over to wiki.d/ ... and bingo! I got the same 
behavior as before: "waiting for..." and neither a page served nor a 
timeout.


Some additional observations:

1. The last change was done at 17:20, as checking .lastmod and 
Main.AllRecentChanges revealed (that was confirmed by ll -t, which 
showed that these were indeed the last files changed). However, as can 
be seen above, the .flock file was last created/changed far later.

2. Somehow, the .flock file got created with the wrong user. I don't 
know how this ever might have happened. I've got even less of a clue why 
this should be a problem - any process in group www should be able to 
remove or touch that file, since both the file and the wiki.d directory 
are in group www and group writable.

3. There was a strange file called NOOP in wiki.d/ . That's probably 
unrelated, because it is already a week old, but I'm not sure how such a 
file might have been created. (It contained a wiki page, but one that 
wasn't named NOOP. Actually, NOOP isn't a valid name for a wiki page file.)

Any clues?

Regards,
Jo



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