Re: checksum woes

[Frank Ranner]

Tod Oace wrote:
> > > A couple weeks ago I posted a message about trouble I'm having with
> > > type=checksum network copies occasionally firing off when files have
> > > not changed on the server.
> >
> >
> > I'd be VERY interested to hear if you solve this one.  I'm having the
> > EXACT same issue on one of my servers.  The difference in my case is
> > that I'm not using a checksum database of any kind.  All the checksums
> > get computed in real-time (server-side AND client-side).
>
>
> Well that's disturbing/interesting. Yesterday I tried disabling the 
> checksum database on the server side and have still been seeing the 
> problems. So earlier today I disabled it on the client side and have 
> seen a couple more cases of it since then. I'm not sure if it's slowed 
> down any, but I'll know for sure tomorrow. I've been tracking one 
> particular problem for the past couple weeks and have a good baseline.
>
> > I've been beating my head against the wall on this for a while.
>
>
> I'm glad I'm not the only one. I guess.  :)
>
> I'll try and capture and analyze more cfservd debug output soon.

I am having the same problem. However it is happening every time on some 
copies. Not only that, it then tries to save the file in 
/var/spool/cfengine, and finds an entry already there. It then 
recursively moves the saved files, and after a while I get files with 
multiple instances of _var_spool_cfengine at the beginning and umpteen 
.cfsaved extensions on the end.

I haven't looked into the problem yet. I only found it because 'locate' 
was segfaulting. Doing `locate '*' | tail` showed the segfault occuring 
after printing some of the overlong cfengine spool files.

It is interesting that the extraneous copies occur regardless of the 
checksum database. I suspected that the problem was related to the 
unsafe concurrent access to the checksum DB. It appears not. One of the 
files that gets copied every time is nedit. The destination is 
/usr/local/bin. There is definitely an entry for nedit in the checksum 
database. The database can be examined using db_dump with the -p option 
to show human readable output instead of hexified text.

Since the problem is solid for me I will try and duplicate it with the 
smallest config file I can manage. Then I should be able to do full 
debugging, trussing, network snooping, etc.

Regards,
Frank Ranner