/var is busy? the hell??

[dmorin at morinfamily.com (Duane Morin)]

Ok, this was weird. I sit at my gnome machine and login.  I notice that some 
of my applets don't show up on the panel. I've seen this before -- I call up a 
terminal and try to run netscape.  I get an X "Maximum number of clients 
reached" error.  By the way, if someone can tell me how to fix this without 
rebooting, I'd love to hear it.  But that's not today's problem...

I reboot.  During shutdown, I get a message that says something like "/var 
unmountable, drive is busy."  That scared the bejesus out of me, because I 
figure if I lose /var I'm at serious risk of booting into a non-bootable 
machine.  But everything booted fine, and there was no evidence of a problem 
with /var.

Any clues on what might cause that?  The only connection I could see is that 
recently I added an account to the machine, which included mucking in 
/var/spool/mail/foo a little bit to get the permissions on her mail right.  I 
suppose it's possible that whatever mail agent I set up for her opened up a 
file handle in /var and left it open, thus causing the problem?  That's a 
stretch, I know.

Duane


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