I have a similar experience with an app that writes out a temporary  
file.  It always uses the same name for the file - occasionally it  
will begin to produce errors to the effect that it could not write  
the file.  The file is not locked or anything, but it fails just the  
same.  I haven't had any luck finding the cause because of its  
transient nature.

-Todd Blanchard


On Apr 9, 2007, at 10:30 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Hi Folks -
>
> I had an odd effect today and I'm wondering if other people might  
> have seen something similar in the past. One of our Linux servers  
> (which has been running happily for a week) has an update process  
> running which every five minutes checks to see if there is new data  
> on the disk and if so, updates itself from it.
>
> Today, I noticed that it stopped updating itself and investigating  
> showed that it hit repeatedly an "InvalidDirectoryError" when  
> trying to update itself. Trying to understand what was going on I  
> went into the system life via VNC and stepped through the update  
> method and suddenly it started working again! No more  
> InvalidDirectoryErrors, updating went fine.
>
> I'm at a complete loss as what might have caused this error.  
> Unfortunately (since I was doing it on the life system) I couldn't  
> investigate the error condition closer but there is a possibility  
> that directory service had been used from different threads. Anyone  
> having any ideas? (the only thing I am certain is that attaching  
> VNC was *not* what it made it working again - I saw the error while  
> I was in there with VNC and it became working again after I stepped  
> through the method).
>
> Any help is greatly appreciated. So are similar experiences and  
> workarounds for the issue. The server itself is running Fedora Core 4.
>
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
>