Bug#396728: openbsd-inetd: Priority change in Sarge breaks inetd-based services during installation
Package: openbsd-inetd
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks unrelated software
The recent priority exchange of openbsd-inetd (extra in 3.1r3,
important in 3.1r4) and netkit-inetd (vice versa) was said to have
happened only in Etch/Sid, but in fact it did also happen in Sarge and
there it breaks the inetd services installation during base-config.
Cause of this are two independent things:
a) openbsd-inetd refuses to start (or better said stops) if there are
no inetd services configured at the time, it is started.
b) If any inetd based services (e.g. pidentd) are installed afterwards
and use /usr/sbin/update-inetd from the package netbase (see
below), that services won't start up, since /usr/sbin/update-inetd
only killhups inetd, which doesn't do anything, since there is no
inetd running anymore (in comparsion to netkit-inetd's behaviour).
In our environment (Department of Physics, ETH Zurich, more than 150
automatically installed Debian Sarge workstations) this breaks the
whole installation, since we use base-config's preseeding to fetch
further configuration and packages from a web-server, which needs to
check if root or some other user is trying to download them. For
enforcing root-only downloads we are using ident requests.
Without inetd and therefore without identd this fails and so the whole
automatic installation fails -- since Sarge 3.1r4. A manual reboot
would restart base-config and since then inetd.conf contains services,
openbsd-inetd would start up and the installation would resume.
(Credits for finding out the real reason behind the breakage go to
Neil Franklin (http://neil.franklin.ch/), with additional work by
Gürkan Sengün (http://www.linuks.mine.nu/).)
Besides that, it's not very useful to let base-config install
netkit-inetd just to remove it when tasksel installs all important
packages:
---snip---
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
g++-3.3 gcc-3.4-base libstdc++5-3.3-dev
The following packages will be automatically REMOVED:
netkit-inetd
The following NEW packages will be installed:
bc bin86 bind9-host bison dc dictionaries-common dmidecode dnsutils
doc-debian doc-linux-text file finger flex ftp g++ g++-3.3 gcc-3.4-base
gdb gnu-efi gnupg iamerican ibritish ispell less libbz2-1.0 libc6-dev
libdb4.3 libdns16 libevent1 libgc1 libgpmg1 libident libidn11 libisc7
libkrb53 libldap-2.2-7 libldap2 liblwres1 libmagic1 libncursesw5
libnfsidmap1 libnss-db libreadline4 libreadline5 libsasl2 libselinux1
libsepol1 libstdc++5-3.3-dev libstdc++6 libtasn1-0 linux-kernel-headers
lpr lsb-base lsof m4 manpages-dev mime-support module-init-tools mpack
mtools mtr-tiny mutt ncurses-term netcat nfs-common openbsd-inetd pidentd
portmap procmail python python-newt python2.3 reportbug sharutils slang1
strace tcsh texinfo time traceroute w3m wamerican whois
The following packages will be REMOVED:
netkit-inetd
The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed:
ca-certificates libsasl2-modules python2.3-cjkcodecs python2.3-iconvcodec
python2.3-japanese-codecs python2.3-korean-codecs wbritish
0 packages upgraded, 83 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 37.2MB of archives. After unpacking 97.4MB will be used.
---snap---
Looks to me, that the changes made to Etch/Sid somehow propagated to
Sarge, too, although they weren't expected to do so.
JFYI: Maybe other packages are affected, too, in a similar way. Using
wdiff on base-config.logs from 3.1r3 (September 2006) and 3.1r4
(November 2006) installations I found the following differences in the
list of installed packages:
New since r4: dmidecode, gcc-3.4-base, libselinux1, libsepol1,
libstdc++6, lsb-base, netcat, openbsd-inetd
Missing since r4: rcs, ssh, netkit-inetd
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.33.2-1-dphys-k8-smp-64gb
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)
Versions of packages openbsd-inetd depends on:
ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-22sarge4 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libwrap0 7.6.dbs-8 Wietse Venema's TCP wrappers libra
ii netbase 4.21 Basic TCP/IP networking system
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