On Sun, 2 Aug 2009, Marc Glisse wrote:
On the other hand, with sudo -i, the error disappears. Note that my HOME is on a NFS partition.
A bit more precision on this: if I run: HOME=/some/dir sudo ...then it only fails when /some/dir exists, is on NFS and "other" doesn't have write permission on it. strace just hangs, but inotifywatch shows these stats on /some/dir during the dpkg-reconfigure:
total modify close_write open create delete filename 35 7 7 7 7 7 dir/So the problem is indeed that the installation script somewhere tries to do things in HOME, without first setting HOME to a safe value.
After looking a bit, the problem appears during the call to unopkg.bin. Calling it directly, strace works, and shows: open("/home/glisse/.execooo3CRn04", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL, 0600) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
It tries it 7 times with 7 different random suffixes (and shows the error message 7 times).
-- Marc Glisse