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