[dm-devel] Chicken and egg problem with multipath-tools

[Hannes Reinecke]

On 03/04/2013 12:00 PM, Andrei B. wrote:
>
>
> --- On Mon, 3/4/13, Hannes Reinecke <hare at suse.de> wrote:
>
>> From: Hannes Reinecke <hare at suse.de>
>
>>> The problem is that multipathd wants to create a PID
>> file under /var (which is at this time readonly).
>>> This fails and multipathd fails to start.
>>> It took me a lot of testing and reboots until I managed
>> to determine this is the actual problem.
>>>
>
>> Hmm. Why? multipathd can happily live without a PID file;
>> SUSE has been doing this for years (for precisely the same
>> reason).
>> Check the SUSE init scripts.
>
> Official (from author's website) multipath-tools contain a
 > multipathd that has hardcoded PIDFILE location and there is
 > no runtime option to change its location or disable it.
 > Both manpage and source show this.
> Maybe SUSE has a modified multipathd with added option to
 > control PIDFILE creation.
>

multipathd/main.c:1996
         /* Startup complete, create logfile */
         pid_rc = pidfile_create(DEFAULT_PIDFILE, daemon_pid);
         /* Ignore errors, we can live without */


No option, but multipathd doesn't _need_ to create a pidfile.
And it certainly won't abort if it cannot create one.

Cheers,

Hannes
-- 
Dr. Hannes Reinecke		      zSeries & Storage
hare at suse.de			      +49 911 74053 688
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg
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