Re: Upgrading buster => bullseye. Canonicalization of /var/log/journal.

[Kushal Kumaran <kushal@locationd.net>]

On Wed, Sep 29 2021 at 10:35:35 PM, David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote:
> On Wed 29 Sep 2021 at 16:46:14 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 07:05:37AM -0700, peter@easthope.ca wrote:
>> >     From: Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org>
>> >     Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2021 13:41:05 -0400
>> > > What does it look like?
>> > > 
>> > > ls -ld / /var /var/log /var/log/journal
>> > 
>> > root@joule:/# ls -ld / /var /var/log
>> > drwxr-xr-x 18 peter peter 4096 Sep 27 18:00 /
>> > drwxr-xr-x 11 root  root  4096 Nov  3  2020 /var
>> > drwxr-xr-x 10 root  root  4096 Sep 29 06:39 /var/log
>> 
>> The ownership of the / directory is wrong.  It should be root:root,
>> not peter:peter.
>> 
>> chown root:root /
>> 
>> Everything else looks OK at the moment.
>
> Similar to https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2021/07/msg00907.html
> but even worse (there, it was only group ownership that was wrong).
> It does appear that there's a subset of people who immediately
> recognise this warning message as meaning "wrong ownership",
> Greg (possibly), Kushal and of course Poettering:
>

FWIW, that email was the first I'd ever heard of the problem.  My
solution was based on a web search, which probably led me to the
following link, but I neglected to include that in my email.

> https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11282
>
> Would it be sensible for the message to actually mention ownership,
> or can it apply to very different circumstances (beyond permissions,
> that is)? I've failed to find any other cause, but see a lot of
> people messing up their ownership.

According to the code at
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/dd4c15296cce001287d03a6647a751f253de2a51/src/basic/fs-util.c#L736,
the message has been updated three months ago to include ownership of
the offending directories.  At this point, we'd need to wait for a newer
version of systemd to migrate into debian repos.

>
> Is this being done by people, say, untarring archives as root, or
> are there some buggy programs out there? One person claimed it
> happened through formatting a partition with some gnome program.
> Is that likely?
>
> Cheers,
> David.