cryptmount left in bad state if umount used

[wgunruh]

Linux Mageia 9 (but this has been there for many years by now) I have a cryptmount file, -- letc call it unruhmail, which is mounted on ~unruh/mail. Occasionally I get forgetful and do umount ~unruh/mail This seems to leave cryptmount in a bad situation for which it seems the only solution is a reboot. If I do df it indicates that ~unruh/mail is mounted from /dev/mapper/unruhmail, but the contents are not there in ~unruh/mail, as it it is not mounted. If I thendo cryptmount -u unruhmail it tells me unruhmail is not mounted . If I do cryptmount unruhmail, it tells me it is already mounted (and /dev/mapper/unruhmail still exits). So I can neither mount or unmount that encrypted partition. The only way out seems to be to reboot, which is a minor disaster as this is central server serving a number of other machines. Is there some way of getting out of this mess without rebooting? I know that not using umount on a cryptmounted file is one answer, but since I persist in occasionally doing that, that is not a useful answer.

[rwpenney]

I agree it's not ideal to use (ordinary) umount if you've previously mounted a filesystem using cryptmount, and that a system reboot is best avoided. There are a few options that may be worth trying, in order of increasing risk of collateral damage:

• Remount /dev/mapper/unruhmail onto ~/unruh/mail and then use cryptmount -u unruhmail as normal.
• Run sudo cryptmount --release unruhmail to tidy-up the /dev/mapper artefacts, then try cryptmount unruhmail as usual.
• If you have no other cryptmount-managed filesystems active, you could use sudo cryptmount --safetynet to tidy-up any /dev/mapper and other runtime artefacts managed by cryptmount.
• Unmount (using cryptmount -u all other cryptmount-managed filesystems, run sudo cryptmount --release unruhmail and then delete /run/cryptmount.status, Before running cryptmount some_target.