[news.eclipse.newcomer] Re: Ecplipse 3.2.1 wokspace on NFS mounted drive

[Guenther Koegel <guenther.koegel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Andreas,

Andreas Schuler schrieb:
> Hello,
>
> we have the follwing problem with Eclipse 3.2.1 Eclipse is running on
> fedora core 5. We tried to create the workspace on a NFS mounted
> drive (located on a windows server 2003 with services for unix 3.5).
> While creating the workspace the following error occures: Workspace
> in use or cannot be created, please choose a different one.

quite a strange set-up. Why do you want to create your workspace on the 
net? You are going to have a (performance) penalty for doing so.

> In the log file we can see the following:
> ...
> "No locks available". A common reason is that the file system or
> Runtime Environment does not support file locking for that location.
> Please choose a different location, or disable file locking passing 
> "-Dosgi.locking=none" as a VM argument. !STACK 0 java.io.IOException:
> An error occurred while locking file 
> "/zfznv/users_nas2/install/.eclipse/org.eclipse.platform_3.2.0/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/.manager/.fileTableLock":

The error message is clear about where the problem lies... Eclipse tries 
to lock a file for exclusive use, so nobody else works with the same 
workspace at the same time.

> "No locks available". A common reason is that the file system or
> Runtime Environment does not support file locking for that location.
> Please choose a different location, or disable file locking passing 
> "-Dosgi.locking=none" as a VM argument.

The diagnose "does not support file locking" tells you that it cannot 
lock the file because the (remote) file system does not support this action.

> Does anybody has a idea what could be the problem? Creating the 
> workspace on the local drive works fine. Thanks for your help.

You are using the wrong tool. You need a file system that supports file 
locking. Typically local file system support this. For remote file 
systems like NFS it's not so common. From a previous life in the Unix 
world I think I remember that you need a "lock daemon" running on the 
server to get the service for locking files.

Your options:
* use a local file system
* use a NFS file system on a real Unix system
* try to configure a lock daemon on the server

Bye,

Günther