[pulseaudio-discuss] Pulse audio and NFS home directories.

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 13.05.09 11:57, mike _ (arizonagroovejet at gmail.com) wrote:

> 
> 2009/5/9 mike _ <arizonagroovejet at gmail.com>:
> >
> > I'm not in a position to try the python you posted until Monday but
> > I'll try it both on a file that is several megabytes in an NFS home
> > directory and one of the much smaller files on the local disk and post
> > the results.
> 
> I've tried the Python you suggested on both a file in an NFS mounted
> home directory and a home directory on the local disk. In both cases I
> got the error 'resource temporarily unavailable' but when I copied the
> files in to /tmp and used the Python on them it worked.
> For both files the result was the same:

That error is probably due to the bsd locking gdbm does by default. We
disable that, and so should you when you access those files via
python. I.e. pass "u" in the mode string to gdbm.open().

> Yep, 3.1M. So it seems that file size discrepancies are not  caused by
> pulseaudio but by gdbm. Or by gdbm+NFS. Or gdbm+NFS+the file system in
> use. Or something. Not pulseaudio anyway.

I have now reproduced this here. A trivial gdbm file is 13k in side
when written directly. 769k when written via nfs on the same
location. Weird shit.

gdbm should probably be considered obsolete and this is just another
indication that there is every reason to consider it so.

There have been plans to abstract the db interfacing in pa as a new
pa_database API. We probably should do that and then switch to tdb as
default backend on Linux. Always happy to take patches.

> That leaves the issue of pulseaudio not working and saying ""failed to
> create secure directory: permission denied" when ~/.pulse is a symlink
> to somewhere on the local harddisk. Anyone got any ideas on that?

We want to make sure nobody can play games with us and redirect
~/.pulse to some unsafe location. We hence verify that ~/.pulse is a
proper directory.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4