#5243 webmin spawns 6 copies of parted at login for blank drive
os/kernel: Manjaro KDE 4.19.24-1
webmin: 1.900-1 ( installed from AUR arch user repository package )
browser: Chromium version 72.0.3626.119 (Official Build) Arch Linux (64-bit)
New webmin user/install here, and as the title suggests, I just logged into webmin, and the dashboard was taking a very long time to update. I opened up a terminal and used 'ps' to look at processes, and saw the following:
root 8957 6148 3384 ? D 13:46 0:24 parted /dev/sdb unit cyl print
root 9232 6148 3476 ? D 13:46 0:24 parted /dev/sdb unit cyl print
root 10312 6148 3388 ? D 13:48 0:23 parted /dev/sdb unit cyl print
root 10564 6148 3372 ? D 13:48 0:22 parted /dev/sdb unit cyl print
root 10741 6148 3416 ? D 13:48 0:22 parted /dev/sdb unit cyl print
root 11098 6148 3520 ? D 13:48 0:21 parted /dev/sdb unit cyl print
It appears as if webmin is attempting to read the partitions from the hard drive device that is /dev/sdb. Well, it just so happens, that /dev/sdb in my system is a hard drive that I have mounted in a hot swap bay, and I'm currently using the dd command to write zeros to the entire drive.
So ... webmin is getting confused by trying to read a partition from a drive that does not have a partition, and is being bogged down by a large amount of hard drive i/o. Not a good situation for software that is supposed to make administration of a "server" easier.
I attempted to stop webmin by issuing a 'systemctl stop webmin.service' and this command hung for several minutes before finally completing. During this time, I grepped the webmin files installed at /opt/webmin and the offending code looks like it might be located in the file /fdisk/fdisk-lib.pl.
Also, it strikes me as odd that I had to create a sourceforge account to report this bug. Why doesn't webmin allow me to report webmin bugs to the webmin developers directly from within webmin ?
- Kevin Flynn
Webmin might be running parted as part of the process of finding the mapping between drives and partitions. Normally this is pretty fast so it's not an issue,but I can see how it might hang if you're also re-formatting the drive at the same time.
Regarding bug submission, there is no global accout system in Webmin so web just rely on sourceforge (or github) to notify bug submitters via email about updates to their bugs.