Re: {bb} BB shutdown kill problems - solved

[Philip Clark <bblist@cannae.uklinux.net>]

On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 23:10 +0100, John Horne wrote:
> 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.

Nice :)

> 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.

I think that was the original intention of the symlink, to avoid the
need to update any "rc" scripts when BB was updated. It might be
helpful, however, to add a note in the documentation to ensure that
people don't use the symlinked path when setting BBHOME.

Cheers, Phil.



--
Abstainer, n.: A weak person who yields to the temptation of
denying himself a pleasure.
(Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary")


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