Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

had a nasty issue today with my system. seems like fedora core 4/xine has been choking on the DVD player. really bites. so the thing is that i was trying to get my dvd player to mount (automount is fucked up) and ended up using a forced mount. that, for some reason, only made the situation worse and froze the command! and this was root! i couldn't kill it either. obviously, the only thing to do was reboot. however, since my home directory is mounted, i'm pretty cautious about just rebooting it. umount wouldn't work though because some processes were accessing the mount and i kept getting "device is busy" messages. so unless i shut it down the hardway, i could've had issues with my external drive. what to do? fuser and umount -l to the rescue! fuser can show which users access a particular device or filesystem. you can do a fuser -v to get a listing of users. but the handy dandy piece is fuser -k. that'll send a SIGKILL signal to those processes. unfortunately, that still didn't resolve my issue. those processes (namely automount and xine) still persisted. so the next thing to try was umount -l on the external drive. that's a lazy umount that somehow allows you to unmount a device and let the processes, etc. accessing that device get cleaned up later. so in the end, that saved my ass. on the side, xine has really pissed me off. on core 1, it worked beautifully. somehow the upgrades caused some issues that cause problems with the process. i suggest not using xine for playing dvds. other formats don't show this issue though.