Error: "general: main: critical: fflush() to pid file" in named.run when loading novell-named

  • 7007791
  • 04-Feb-2011
  • 21-Oct-2013

Environment

Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 (OES 2) 
Novell DNS

Situation

rcnovell-named start fails to load named. Could not resolve DNS names. rcnovell-named status returned 'unused'. In /var/log/messages and /var/opt/novell/log/named/named.run, the following error was seen:
 
general: main: critical: fflush() to pid file '/var/opt/novell/run/named/named.pid' failed
general: main: critical: exiting (due to early fatal error)
 
named.pid was being created, but was a 0 byte file.

Resolution

The problem was that the /var mount was almost out of disk space. Performing a 'df -h' showed that 0% was free (I can't confirm, but it is believed earlier when the problem first happened that there was 2% free).
We performed a search in /var looking for large files:
 
find /var -type f -size +100000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }' 
 
We found a 7GB+ log file (debug had been enabled the day before). After removing the file, we were able to perform an rcnovell-named start and it started just fine.