can't unmount cdrom, device is busy

[Ice9]

I just instaled FC2 on my IBM laptop at work and I must say I'm pretty impressed with how snappy this distro is.
Almost everything runs fine out of the box, KDE 3.2.2, Krusader, K3b ....

To mount and unmount devices I often create icons on my desktop and right-click/mount or unmount them.
Now, this is a problem that's been persistent for me since I started using RH8, quite often I get an error message telling me
unable to unmount - device is busy

I did

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fuser /mnt/cdrom

and found out that fam was locking my cdrom drive.
That kinda confused me, why is it necesary to monitor a cdrom for file alteration?
Killing the process lets me unmount the drive and the problem doesn't appear again until the next reboot.

This brings me to my question, is there any way I can tell fam to leave my cdrom alone?
I looked into /etc/fam.conf and it's pretty basic as a config file, I also Googled on the subject but didn't find anything conclusive.

thanks

[Void Main]

Hmm, that's always one of the first things I turn off when I install Fedora, maybe that's why I have never run into the problem:

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# chkconfig sgi_fam off
# service xinetd restart


If fact I don't use any xinetd processes at all on desktop setups so I usually just turn the whole shebang off:

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# chkconfig xinetd off
# service xinetd stop


I also turn off all other NFS related services (if I don't plan on using NFS which I usually don't plan on for desktops):

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# chkconfig nfs off
# chkconfig nfslock off
# chkconfig portmap off
# service portmap stop
# service nfslock stop
# service nfs stop


[Ice9]

Thanks Void Main, I was not sure I could turn fam off completely since I found some articles from kde developpers arguing about Red Hat wanting them to turn off fam ... (that was back to RH 7.3)

As far as nfs goes, since I will switch my wife's and the kids' pc's to linux as wellin a very near future I thought I needed nfs for them to be able to access the shares on the servers through their file manager.
I haven't got too many problems to login via ssh and copy files with scp but I know they will want to be able to work with linux in the same way they wotk with Windows now, clickety-click and drag and drop.
So I thought of setting up some nfs shares and modify their fstab to have the shares show up automatically at each boot.

Obviously I still have lots to learn so there might be another (easier?) way.
For now I have one file & print server running RH9 and one dedicated server for games running UT2003 and Quake 3, there's gonna be 4 workstations connected.
At some point I probably will have to set up samba shares for the kids as well ...

[Void Main]

You can use NFS to do what you want, just make sure that the machine you create the NFS shares on (the server) is on all the time. Regarding the sgi_fam xinetd service, it appears that nautilus uses it and I'm not sure what apps in KDE use it (probably konqueror). I have never noticed any adverse behavior with it off, but then I don't use graphical file managers so maybe it does have some effect. I just don't like having extra garbage turned on, espectially garbage that opens network sockets (even if they appear to be restricted to localhost). I haven't found a lot of information on it but there are snippets, like this thread:

http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedo ... 00156.html

It would be interested to read any more that you might have regarding adverse behavior by turning it off.

[Ice9]

Yes, Nautilus and Konqueror use fam but I don't know for what ...
I turned the service off and didn't notice any adverse behavior until now.
I would imagine that it provides funtionalities like "real-time" updates of the file manager when you drag and drop files from one dir to another.
When you refresh the window you can monitor the progress of the copying/moving.

But then again when I Googled a bit I read lots of stuff about fam being necessary for a lot of stuff (like portmapper) I don't know too much about.
Apparently you need portmapper to run nfs, and sgi_fam appears to be involved with a lot more stuff.
I'll leave it off and won't turn it on on my future installs to see if anything turns out to be broken.

[Void Main]

I use NFS and don't use fam. Hmmm.