Hello On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 02:54:40PM -0300, Jorge L. deLyra wrote: > Dear Debian developers, > > I would like to consult the developer community on the following issue. > > Here is the story: Debian packages including daemons may be a problem for > people installing them via chroot, due to the fact that the packages will > typically try to stop and restart the daemons. In fact, this can interact > destructively with the system of the server, accidentally killing this or > that process. It may also cause the Debian package tools to crash. > > Installation via chroot can be very useful for embedded systems, and also > for diskless machines that boot remotely from a server and mount the root > via NFS. If a package is being installed via chroot running in the server > it does not really make any sense to try to stop or start daemons. > > Although most packages do in fact survive this process, in the sense that > the installation completes despite some errors when stopping and starting > daemons, some do cause the package tools to exit in error, leaving behind > a broken package. One example that is particularly troublesome is rwhod. > > Now, all this can be avoided very simply by a line in the init.d/ script > for the daemon, checking that /proc is mounted. Since it will be mounted > on normal systems but typically not when using a chroot shell, it serves > as a flag to enable the daemon restarting procedure. > > I am using successfully the following line to fix the situation in the > case of the troublesome rwhod package, near the top of the file: > > test -e /proc/mounts || exit 0 > > So here are my questions: is there any way in which including a line like > this in the init.d/ scripts can be adopted as a standard procedure in the > future, for all Debian packages containing daemons? > > Are there, perhaps, undesirable side effects to this?
Yes there are. First of all people can mount entire or all of proc into a chroot. The second problem is with vservers (www.linux-vserver.org) and the util-vserver tools. Using this project you can mask parts (at least with latest development branch as I have understood it) of /proc, so this can have really bad side effects. > Is there some other, better solution to this problem? Hopefully yes. > Solving this problem would certainly help people using chroot to install > packages and so help to extend the range of applicability and usefulness > of Debian. > Cheers, I suggest you actually use the vserver project (or the util-vserver and kernel-patch-vserver packages) in order to have full virtualization of your chroot if that is what you want. Regards, // Ola > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > Jorge L. deLyra, Associate Professor of Physics > The University of Sao Paulo, IFUSP-DFMA > For more information: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ---------------------------------------------------------------- > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- --------------------- Ola Lundqvist --------------------------- / [EMAIL PROTECTED] Annebergsslingan 37 \ | [EMAIL PROTECTED] 654 65 KARLSTAD | | +46 (0)54-10 14 30 +46 (0)70-332 1551 | | http://www.opal.dhs.org UIN/icq: 4912500 | \ gpg/f.p.: 7090 A92B 18FE 7994 0C36 4FE4 18A1 B1CF 0FE5 3DD9 / --------------------------------------------------------------- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]