{bb} BB shutdown kill problems - solved

[John Horne <john.horne@plymouth.ac.uk>]

Hello,

Apologies if this has been discussed and resolved before, but, as
mentioned earlier, the list archives seem to have stopped. As far as I
can tell others have had at least one of these problems, but the last
one mentioned is from the end of 2005.

I have finally gotten around to looking at a couple of problems that we
have had for some time when stopping BB. Using BB version 1.9i, when we
stop BB (on Fedora, RHEL and CentOS systems) using a script we get:

  # service bb stop
  Stopping Big Brother/home/bbuser/bbc/runbb.sh: line 145: kill: (29925)
  - Operation not permitted

If we run the runbb.sh script manually, as the BB user, we get a
'Terminated' error message, and the BBPID and runbb.sh files left dumped
in the BB tmp directory. If you stop and start BB a few times, you get a
collection of these files!

Solutions:
1) The 'Terminated' error and the files being left behind is because the
runbb.sh script is killing itself off before it finishes. Hence the
'Terminated' message. Changing runbb.sh at line 137 onwards
from:

                        if test "$PSTYPE"
                        then
                                # try clean
                                kill $2
                                # then not so clean
                                kill -9 $2 >/dev/null 2>&1
                        else
                                # try clean
                                kill $1
                                # then not so clean
                                kill -9 $1 >/dev/null 2>&1
                        fi

to:

                        if test "$PSTYPE"
                        then
                                test $2 = $$ && continue
                                # try clean
                                kill $2
                                # then not so clean
                                kill -9 $2 >/dev/null 2>&1
                        else
                                test $1 = $$ && continue
                                # try clean
                                kill $1
                                # then not so clean
                                kill -9 $1 >/dev/null 2>&1
                        fi

The 2 additional lines simply say that if the PID being looked at is the
PID of this process, then ignore it. This way the runbb.sh script
finishes, and the BBPID and runbb.sh files are removed.


2) The 'Operation not permitted' error problem may not affect all users.
In our case, following the README.INSTALL instructions (section 5), we
created a soft link in the BB users home directory to the actual
installation directory. Hence, in our case, /home/bbuser/bbc is a link
to /home/bbuser/bbc1.9i-btf. In the startup/shutdown script, *and* in
the runbb.sh script we changed BBHOME to '/home/bbuser/bbc'.

The 'Operation not permitted' error is caused by the runbb.sh script
looking for all the processes with the string $BBHOME in them, and
trying to kill them off. However, when using our script to start and
stop BB, this is run as root, BB sees the root process in the 'ps'
command output that it uses. It then tries to kill the process off.
Obviously the BB user is not allowed to kill off a root process, so you
get the 'Operation not permitted' error.

If you created the soft link, and used that in your startup/shutdown
script and left the runbb.sh script alone (so in our case it would have
'BBHOME=/home/bbuser/bbc1.9i-btf'), then the problem does not occur. The
reason is that runbb.sh looks through the 'ps' output for processes
using '/home/bbuser/bbc1.9i-btf', but the shutdown script is using
'/home/bbuser/bbc'. Hence runbb.sh does not see the root process, so
does not try and kill it off, and so we get no 'Operation not permitted'
error message.

So to some extent this problem was caused by ourselves. We have put back
the runbb.sh script to its original self, and stopping BB now works
fine.


That's it. Again, sorry if this is old news, but perhaps someone will
find it helpful.

John.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK  Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: John.Horne@plymouth.ac.uk       Fax: +44 (0)1752 233839
--
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