Rebooting Linux.

[swestrup]

People keep telling me that, unlike Windows, you don't have to reboot Linux when something hangs. That's certainly not MY experience. Mine is that for every 48 hours of working on a Linux system, I seem to hang something so bad that I can find no way to fix it, short of reboot.

Here's a prime example:  I just burned a DVD. It worked fine. I ejected the DVD and re-inserted it. I then browsed into it with Nautilus to check it out. I went into a sub-diretory and waited for a file list, and waited, and waited, and waited. I closed nautilus and looked at the directory in term. Its all there. Fine, I'll eject the disk.

It won't eject. umount says its still 'busy', but I have no idea WHAT it thinks its busy doing. I try a force umount. No go. Then a lazy umount. Okay, THAT worked.

Can I eject the disk now? Nope. Well, its umounted, so I use a paperclip to remove the DVD, and put a new blank in. The new disk is not detected. (Normally sticking a blank in the drive pop-up the burner software, not something I asked for, but it happens to be what I want this time.)

Just in case its causing a problem, I kill Nautilus. Then I try to manually mount the blank disk, to see if it will at least look at it. That was 10 minutes ago. Mount is still in the process of 'mounting' and is ignoring CTRL-C and similar inducements to stop.

The drive light is on, and won't go off. My instinct at this point is to powercycle the damn thing, but I'm hoping some Linux folx here can tell me how to get it back into a sane state without resorting to that.

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Edit: I couldn't kill the attempted mount, but it eventually gave up after 15 minutes. It produced no visible error. The drive is unmounted, and ignores the front-panel eject button.

Comments

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Your kernel is wonky, and when that gets wedged, then you do need a reboot.

I remember the usb-storage module being a piece of crap, not so long ago, and needing to reboot once in a while so I could mount a USB storage widget (it'd work most of the time, then it wouldn't, and it'd stay broken until I rebooted).

[sfllaw.livejournal.com]

The lazy unmount did not "work" like you expected it to. It just returned after telling Linux to "unmount this point once it becomes unused."

You've still got something using that mountpoint. You should find out which application is holding on to it and tell it to stop. You can use fuser to find out which ones those are.

[sps.livejournal.com]

Hm, well, this provokes a 'what the hell is Nautilus?'-type response from me. Semi-seriously, isn't it a deliberate attempt to write a Windows-Explorer type integrated everything that never ever dies? In which case, this behaviour is, um, 'correct', and it should just never have been written for an O/S that uses explicit mounts.

Or maybe I'm being knee-jerky.

[swestrup]

fuser says /mnt/cdrom is not in use. I still can't mount anything. I guess I WILL have to reboot.

[sfllaw.livejournal.com]

Hmm... Did you remember to use the -m option to fuser?

[swestrup]

Yup. The output from 'fuser -m /mnt' and 'fuser -m /mnt/cdrom' are identical.

[thebabynancy.livejournal.com]

My experience with Linux... has been such that rebooting is not at all often... maybe 1 time to every 100 reboots of Windows...