Device is busy

[X11]

[x11@kintaro ~]$ sudo umount /exeleven/pub
umount: /exeleven/pub: device is busy
umount: /exeleven/pub: device is busy

How do I find out whats using it?

[Tux]

/sbin/lsof | grep exeleven

[Void Main]

Or a faster way:

Code: Select all

fuser -m /exeleven/pub


If you wanted to kill all processes using that file system you could add a "-k" to the command line (run as root).

[caveman]

This is something I've been meaning to write about as well..

So now - when I get a device busy - I use "umount -fl /mnt/somemount"
That tries to "force" unmount - and if that fails do a "lazy" unmount..
<quote>
Lazy unmount. Detach the filesystem from the filesystem hierarchy now, and cleanup all references to the filesystem as soon as it is not busy anymore.
(Requires kernel 2.4.11 or later.)
</quote>

Sometime my system hangs during a shutdown - waiting, waiting on a umount when a device is busy.

I've grepped the files in rc.d - made backups and changed all calls to
"umount -f" with "umount -f -l" and the others
"umount -a...." with "umount -a -l..." etc.

so-far it seems to do what I expect without any problems.

[Void Main]

And to make the fuser list a little nicer:

fuser -muv /exeleven/pub

[X11]

[x11@kintaro ~]$ fuser -m /exeleven/pub
/exeleven/pub: Input/output error
[x11@kintaro ~]$ fuser -mk /exeleven/pub
/exeleven/pub: Input/output error

It was mounted via samba to my Windows 2003 box, which crashed like a Windows 2003 box does. I might just have to reboot my poor laptop.

[X11]

umount -fl worked.

[Tux]

I used to have problems with drives mounted on my Samba fileserver.
Changing the filesystem type from smbfs to cifs mysteriously solved many of them.

[X11]

I thought cifs was automatically used if the server supported it. Silly me.