topic Re: Weird message in syslog in Operating System - HP-UX

Weird message in syslog

Steve Ferrara — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 10:17:05 GMT

Can anyone tell me what this message means? There was only one occurence of it in the syslog. Thanks

"automount[2428]: fork a child process to delete an entry from /etc/mnttab"

Re: Weird message in syslog

Pete Randall — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 10:20:14 GMT

It's just automounter going about its business. An inactive NFS mount needed to be unmounted so automount forks a child process to clean up the entry in /etc/mnttab.

Pete

Re: Weird message in syslog

Alex Glennie — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 10:20:49 GMT

The automount message happens when the mnttab is busy and automount needs to update it. Normally the automount process does this
directly. If the mnttab is locked by another process, however, it cannot do it
right away, so, instead of waiting around for the mnttab to become available, it
forks a copy of itself to do the update as soon as the mnttab becomes available.
In this manner the main process can continue to do other work. That's it. The
message is purely informational."

Re: Weird message in syslog

Steve Ferrara — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 10:37:24 GMT

Thanks guys!