Re: X installation calamity solved. Thank you!

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Fri, 22 Aug 1997, Joost Kooij wrote:

> Yeah, this is a common problem. You should not upgrade x with dselect
> when running it in an xterm. Actually, I believe to have seen it once,
> somewhere in some documentation, but I can't remember where. Maybe I
> just remember it from neing mentioned on this list. It is probably
> justified to say that this isn't very well documented :-(
>
> I am currently working on a sort of HOWTO for dselect. It seems to
> be a good idea to include a separate section dedicated to possible x
> hassles.

there's one other similar "gotcha" which i've run into a few times:

    you should not upgrade ssh when dselect or dpkg is running inside
    a ssh session.

this is the reason i leave telnetd enabled on my remote systems
(ssltelnet of course)...so that i can safely run dselect and dpkg
to upgrade the system. i have to remember to make sure that the ssh
package is on HOLD in dselect before running Install, and then telnet in
afterwards to upgrade the ssh package if there is a newer version.

this is a side-effect of running sshd as a daemon rather than out of inetd -
there's a lot of overhead in starting up sshd from inetd so it's better to
run it like this.

maybe a way around it would be for the upgrade pre/post scripts to not kill
sshd if there is one running, but instead to start a background process
which does something like:

    while (sshd_is_running) {
        sleep for 60 seconds
    }
    /etc/init.d/ssh stop
    sleep for 5 seconds
    /etc/init.d/ssh start


craig

--
craig sanders
networking consultant                  Available for casual or contract
temporary autonomous zone              system administration tasks.


--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org . 
Trouble?  e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .