From kasperdanielhansen at gmail.com  Mon Apr 26 17:15:59 2010
From: kasperdanielhansen at gmail.com (Kasper Daniel Hansen)
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:15:59 -0400
Subject: [Rd] 00LOCK and nfs
Message-ID: <s2le780c0971004260815we5156859v293d5b3a6ffd9890@mail.gmail.com>

I am running into a problem with the 00LOCK file and .nfs files.  It
seemed to be caused by the following
  R is installed on NFS
  user A has loaded pkg_A containing a dynamically loaded library
  user B (the administrator) runs install.packages("pkg_A")
  as the final part of the installation process the 00LOCK directory is removed
  this creates a .nfs file because user A has the dynamic library open
  this .nfs file cannot be removed until user A exits R
  because of this, 00LOCK cannot be removed, and if the
install.packages call is going to install packages after pkg_A, they
fail

Now, while there are certainly open questions concerning this, I have
a pretty good idea of the problem, and I even have some ideas on how
to fix it.

But before I spent more time on this, I would like to hear how other
people handle this.  In my analysis, this is a problem whenever you
have R installed on NFS, this R is used by multiple users and you
often run update.packages to keep the installation current.  There
must be plenty of people out there who do this.  In other words:
someone else must have had this problem before (and presumably fixed
it).  I don't know much (anything) about NFS, so perhaps this is
caused by our NFS setup.

Comments, before I spent more hours looking into this?

Thanks,
Kasper



[Rd] 00LOCK and nfs
Kasper Daniel Hansen