[Spread-users] spread daemon (3.17.03) problems on Ubuntu 6.10 edgy eft?

Alex Stewart alexad at seas.upenn.edu
Wed Nov 22 02:12:02 EST 2006


Dear All,

I've been using spread for a few months now (but am still obviously a  
newbie) on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Dapper Drake & Mac OS X 10.4.8 with no  
problems - however I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy eft (on an  
Intel Mac Mini) and installed the spread packages (specifically -  
spread, libspread1 libspread1-dev), now is where the interesting  
problem occurs - and the bizarre hack pseudo-fix:

When executing: 'spread -n localhost' in a terminal as a non-root  
user, the usual spread intro message appears followed by the  
following lines:

Conf_init: using file: /etc/spread/spread.conf
Successfully configured Segment 0 [127.0.0.255:4803] with 1 procs:
			localhost: 127.0.0.1

At this point the daemon 'exits normally' (according to gdb) instead  
of the usual behaviour of printing out additional information (e.g.  
'finished reading configuration file' and info about the membership  
id etc) and remaining active in the terminal - it isn't backgrounded  
as any process that tries to talk to the daemon reports that it isn't  
active (and it doesn't appear as an active process and gdb reports  
that the daemon exits).

If this is executed as root then initially the same thing happens  
(i.e. daemon exits) - but in addition the following log entry is  
written to the /var/log/spread.log file:

[Wed 22 Nov 2006 01:57:54] Finished configuration file.
[Wed 22 Nov 2006 01:57:54] Conf_init: My name: localhost, id:  
127.0.0.1, port: 4803
[Wed 22 Nov 2006 01:57:54] Sess_init: UNIX unable to bind to name / 
var/run/spread/4803, already running

Incidentally /var/run/ is devoid of any spread directory at this point.


Now - here is the bizarre fix that works *only* when the spread  
daemon is run as root (i.e. the spread daemon doesn't exit and spread  
messages are sent & received correctly):

-- completely uninstall the spread packages (specifically: spread,  
libspread1, libspread1-dev)
-- reinstall the packages
-- spread daemon will now run, but *only* when called by user root  
(non-root users get the same performance as before)

(Note: I'm not making any changes to spread.conf at this point - just  
trying to get vanilla working)

This hack lasts *only* until the next restart, after which the spread  
daemon exits as before for all users (root and non-root).  However if  
the process is repeated after the restart then again the spread  
daemon will work for root, but not for any other user.

Has anyone else ever seen this kind of behaviour?  Or have any ideas  
about what might be causing it (edgy?) and/or how to fix it? - any  
help will be gratefully received!

Alex




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