#3 balance -i can't find master process

[Krisda Eaksrun]

I'm running balance 3.6 on OpenBSD 3.1 i386. At the beginning of
running balance, balance -i can connect to the master process,
during that period, I jotted down the master process ID (x), after
balance has been running for awhile, more balance processes
came up, at some point, balance -i begin to think that y is it's master
process and tried to connect to y and fail. At this point, I can still see
that the master process X is still exist.

[Krisda Eaksrun]

Logged In: YES
user_id=645497

Possibly caused by some cron script that remove balance's files in /tmp
?

[Jason Heiss]

Logged In: YES
user_id=215973

I'm having the same problem.

After some research about the magic of shared memory, I know
understand what's going on. The problem is the deletion of
the file in /tmp, it is used as a key to the shared memory
segments used for -i and -c.

Red Hat's tmpwatch cron job deletes files from /tmp which
haven't been accessed in 10 days (see
/etc/cron.daily/tmpwatch), and since nothing ever changes
the access time of balance's tmp file it ends up getting
deleted.

I modified the SHMDIR value in balance.h to be /var/run and
recompiled. /var/run is not touched by Red Hat's tmpwatch
cron jobs, so that should work better. I would suggest that
such a modification ought to be incorporated into the
distribution as many systems will have this problem with /tmp.

[Thomas Obermair]

Logged In: YES
user_id=36384

Fixed.