Hello, I'm using FAI 3.2.16 with lenny. In order to avoid problems with clients which are not shut down properly by the users, I mount /var/run and /var/run as tmpfs (by defining RAMLOCK=yes and RAMRUN=yes in /etc/default/tmpfs). However, this introduces a problem when performing softupdates with FAI: As the directory /var/run/fai is created only once by the package fai-client, the creation of the lock-file /var/run/fai/fai_softupdate_is_running (by /usr/lib/fai/subroutines, line 536) fails.
This results at least in two problems a) two softupdates could run at the same time... b) fcopy -U does not detect the softupdate and copies the file also during a softupdate. (side-remark: I detected this problem as the machine won't boot after a softupdate due to an additional error in files/boot/grub/menu.lst/postinst: There, # during softupdate use this file [ -r $target/var/log/fai/disk_var.sh ] && . $target/var/log/fai/disk_var.sh does not work. I believe $target/var/log/fai/disk_var.sh should be exchanged by $target/var/log/fai/last-install/localhost/disk_var.sh ?? (that's the example-file from /usr/share/doc/fai-doc/examples/simple/files/boot/grub/menu.lst/postinst ) ) 1) I would propose to change the softupdate-routines in order to create the directory /var/run at runtime, at not as part of the package. (maybe that's already done in 3.2.18;-) 2) Why is fcopy checking /var/run/fai/fai_softupdate_is_running in order to determine whether a softupdate is running - instead of checking the environment-variable FAI_ACTION? But nevertheless, FAI is great;-) Axel