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Re: usrmerge on root NFS will not be run automatically



On Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:55:06 +0000
Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> wrote:

> I haven't followed this thread closely, but is my understanding
> correct:
> 
> - You have a FreeBSD NFS server with an export that is a root
>   filesystem of a Debian 11 install shared by multiple clients

Almost. It's not *one* Debian installation, it's many (diskless
workstations PXE boot). Each host has it's own root on the NFS.
Some stuff is shared, but that's not relevant here.

> - You're trying to do an upgrade to Debian 12 running on one of the
>   clients.

Not on one on *all* clients.

> - It tries to do a usrmerge but aborts because NFS is not supported
>   by that script?

Correct. Strangely the usrmerge script succeeded on one host. But on
all others it throws errors. Either relating to NFS being not
supported or because of duplicate files.

> If so, have you tried reporting a bug on this yet?

No I haven't. As far as I understand it's a known issue and the
developer has decided to just have the script fail on NFS.

> If you don't get anywhere with that, I don't think you have much
> choice except to take away the root directory tree to a Linux host,
> chroot into it and complete the merge there, then pack it up again
> and bring it back to your NFS server. Which is very far from ideal.

I'll try to solve the conflicts manually. If that fails, that's what
I have to do, I guess. I didn't expect that level of fiddling with
system files for a simple upgrade. But hey, here we are now.

> The suggestions about running a VM on the NFS server probably aren't
> going to work as you won't be able to take the directory tree out of
> use and export it as a block device to the VM.

Indeed.

> The option of making the usrmerge script work from FreeBSD might not
> be too technically challenging but I wouldn't want to do it without
> assistance from the Debian developers responsible for the script.

I won't do that. I don't speak Perl and will not rewrite the
usrmerge script.

Marco


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