[cobalt-users] Qube3 afpd not restarting reliably on reboot

[Parker Morse <morse@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote in about this a few weeks ago. When our Qube3 cycles power, atalkd 
and/or afpd doesn't reliably restart. Last time it was down, it came back 
up on rebooting the machine; this time I was able to bring it back by 
stopping and starting. Details below:

The Qube, unfortunately, is not on a UPS. (Another issue for another time.
..) We had a nice-sized electrical storm this afternoon, and one of the 
power flickers made our Qube restart. On restart, my Mac could see the 
Qube on the network, but I got an error message indicating that afp 
services were not available.

The admin GUI indicated that AppleShare was indeed enabled. In the shell, 
/etc/rc.d/init.d/atalk status claimed that atalk was running. And there 
were afpd and atalkd files in /var/lock/.

I tried /etc/rc.d/init.d/atalk restart, but that didn't do anything. 
Eventually I tried /etc/rc.d/init.d/atalk stop and /etc/rc.d/init.d/atalk 
start, and then I was able to access our shares. Also, the lock files in 
/var/lock changed timestamps.

So, why is it that when the Qube does a hard reboot (for something like a 
power flicker, but tripping on the plug might do the same thing), atalkd 
doesn't come back up? Is it possible that the lockfile isn't cleared, so 
it thinks it's running when it really isn't? Aside from getting a UPS, 
what should I try to avoid these manual restarts of Appletalk?

Thanks,

pjm