cryptroot fails silently fails on error

[Muelli]

I just updated my machine from 11.10 to 12.04. The update itself failed, because update-manager didn't prevent the laptop from going into suspend. Anyway, I rebooted, chrooted and did dpkg --configure -a and apt-get dist-upgrade. All packages were fine. However, the machine wouldn't boot, because it couldn't find the crypto volume. Turns out, that conf.d/cryptroot was missing. That was because of a *silent* failure from the cryptroot script from initramfs-tools.

The hook ran LVM which in turn expected /var/run/lock to be present. It was indeed present, but a symlink to /run/lock. But that did not exist. So LVM failed and so /etc/crypttab was not copied in the initramfs.

I pulled my hair out for 8 hours to find that out. As a note to that poor person being in trouble next time: When trying to fix and luksOpening the crypto volume, name it exactly as it's written in /etc/crypttab. Because the cryptroot hook from initramfs-tools expects the LUKS device to be named exactly as /etc/crypttab indicates. That took with a couple of hours to figure out.

Anyway, I expected update-initramfs to fail loudly if it couldn't set up the initramfs properly to decrypt my container.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

For me the problem was that crypttab didn't match fstab, update-initramfs happily completed and the system became unbootable.

One more point of failure seems to be when the encrypted volume isn't open, or is open under a name different than fstab/crypttab (i.e. you wanted to rename the mapping).