Wandering Thoughts archives

Listing file locks on Solaris 10

Suppose that you want to find out what files are locked on your Solaris 10 machine, perhaps because it is an NFS server and you really want a global view of what locks you have. On a Linux machine (or a sufficiently old Solaris one) you could use lslk, but it's never been ported to Solaris 10; instead you need to use 'mdb -k', the kernel debugger.

The 'simple' command to get a list of files with file locks is:

echo '::walk lock_graph | ::print lock_descriptor_t l_vnode | ::vnode2path' | mdb -k | sort -u

We need the sort -u because it's reasonably common for our servers to have multiple locks (presumably non-overlapping) against the same file. Your situation may differ.

The mdb ::lminfo command gives you somewhat more information about all of the locks, but it has the drawback that it truncates filenames. What I know about the various fields it prints:

• the bits of the FLAG field come from flock_impl.h, specifically the section about the l_status field. Note that the FLAG field is printed in hex.

• the PID and COMM fields are not necessarily meaningful for client locks on an NFS server. Locks from clients sometimes have a PID of 0 (which shows as as a COMM of <kernel>), sometimes have impossible PIDs (which show as <defunct>, because there's no such PID on the NFS server), and if you're unlucky have the PID (and COMM) of an actual process on your NFS server.

  (See here for a possible discussion of this issue.)

• I believe that you can spot file locks from NFS clients by a FLAG value that includes 0x2000 (aka LOCKMGR_LOCK).

Further digging (to, for example, find the name of the client that theoretically holds the lock) is hampered by the NFS lock manager code unfortunately not being part of the OpenSolaris code base because it's not open source. (Allegedly Sun can't share it because it contains third-party code.)

Possibly, even ideally, there's a better way to get this sort of information. If so, I've been unable to find it.

Sidebar: what the mdb command does

This is a sufficiently complicated mdb command sequence that I feel like breaking it down (if only so that I'll remember how it works later).

If you're doing this inside an interactive mdb session, you can append '! sort -u' to sort it too.

Forwarding emails without false positives

Here is a modest suggestion for email clients: when you forward a message, you should put some marker of this at the front of the Subject: header. Similarly, if you are configuring your email client and you have a choice, you should set it up this way.

(Some but not all clients do this today.)

Many anti-spam systems that I've seen put a spam status marker at the start of the Subject: line; it's a relatively obvious place, and putting it at the start increases the chances that the users will see it (instead of missing it at the end of the line, or having their client not even show a specialized header).

(Also, there is the whole tradition of putting 'Re:' at the start of the subject line for replies.)

Now suppose one of your users forwards a spam-tagged message. This forwarded message is not itself spam (the obvious example is 'dear system staff, why did this get classified as spam?'), but if your client leaves the start of the Subject: header alone, the status marker is completely intact. Filtering badness is quite likely to occur. Putting the forwarding marker at the start of the Subject: line avoids this (and plays along with the existing 'Re:' tradition).

(Having written this I have to admit that my mail client currently isn't set up this way. I should fix that, but there always seem to be more important things to do than fiddle with the guts of my MUA environment, which is somewhat baroque.)