Description of problem: devlabel hangs system when accessing a symlink to an invalid partition I created an automounting devlabel symlink to my USB external hard drive's first partition (/dev/sda1). However, that partition was an unmountable extended partition; the first mountable partition was /dev/sda5. Whenever I plug that device in, my system freezes - no mouse or keyboard, and it won't even respond to pings from other machines on the LAN. Unplugging the device has no effect, a hard reboot is necessary to recover. I corrected the problem -- I removed the devlabel entry, remounted the drive, partitioned and formatted as intended (I made the drive one large vfat partition), and recreated the devlabel entry. Now, everything works great. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): devlabel-0.26.08-3 How reproducible: Every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. obtain an external USB storage device with the first partition created as an extended partition 2. attach device; observe device used (sda, sdb, etc -- assume /dev/sda for this example). 3. devlabel add -d /dev/sda1 -s /dev/external_drive --automount 4. mkdir /mnt/external_drive 5. update /etc/fstab (below should be one line): echo /dev/external_drive /mnt/external_drive auto defaults,uid=tfolger,gid=tfolger 0 0 >> /etc/fstab 6. unattach device 7. devlabel reload (this is likely unnecessary) 8. re-attach device Actual results: System hang Expected results: error in message log ("could not mount /dev/sda1 -- device not mountable") Additional info: Devlabel is great stuff, and it was worth this trouble. I finally have my USB devices automounting on insertion, without having to be careful about what order I plug them in. I realize devlabel is mostly for a different purpose (managing redundant disks in disk arrays), but these capabilities are a great desktop user feature.
The fact that it hung the system is a kernel issue. You might try 2.4.20-9; it has usb-storage fixes.
NEEDINFO ? What additional info is needed?
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/