tcplay hangs at the device mapper stage. This happens in 16.04 LTS version of xubuntu (32 bit and 64 bit) and ubuntu (64bit). This makes tcplay containers not accessible.

[geoff]

Is there anything changed in xubuntu 16.04 LTS that causes tcplay device mapper to hang ?

The following command sequence works fine in xubuntu 14.04 but in 16.04 it hangs at the device mapper stage (5 below) when the valid passphrase is entered. The passphrase I use here is ‘testpw’.

I know it has accepted the correct passphrase because it gives a message if I enter an invalid passphrase.

This is a fresh install using the xubuntu-16.04.1-desktop-i386.iso on the same 32-bit processor laptop as the 14.04 system (multi-boot).

I prefer using tcplay because of the container portability.

There are no dmesg messages during the process on 16.04.

This is the command sequence:

1) fallocate -l 20M foo.tc
2) sudo losetup -f
(response is /dev/loop0)
3) sudo losetup /dev/loop0 foo.tc
4) sudo tcplay -c -d /dev/loop0 -a whirlpool -b AES-256-XTS
(response is
  Passphrase:
  Repeat passphrase:
  Summary of actions:
   - Completely erase *EVERYTHING* on /dev/loop0
   - Create volume on /dev/loop0

   Are you sure you want to proceed? (y/n) y
  Securely erasing the volume...
  This process may take some time depending on the size of the volume
  Creating volume headers...
  Depending on your system, this process may take a few minutes as it uses true random data which might take a while to refill

and after about 10 minutes
Writing volume headers to disk...
All done!
)
5) sudo tcplay -m foo.tc -d /dev/loop0
(response is
Passphrase:

and it then hangs – I have given it up to one hour.
)

On xubuntu 14.04 step (5) takes less than one second, and I can then do the following
6) sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/foo.tc
7) sudo mount /dev/mapper/foo.tc /mnt/FOO_DRIVE/
8) df -h
which shows the normal stuff plus
/dev/mapper/foo.tc 19M 170K 17M 1% /mnt/FOO_DRIVE

On xubuntu 16.04, after killing step 5, the would be step 6 gets the message
‘The file /dev/mapper/foo.tc does not exist and no size was specified.’

The above was the bug experience on a 32-bit laptop.

On a test 64-bit base unit, I was able to show that the bug also applies to 16.04 LTS 64-bit versions of xubuntu and ubuntu

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[geoff (midlands.bowler)]

I should make it clear that it is the device mapper that is at fault. After first installing the 32-bit xubuntu system, I found that tcplay was unable to open an existing container that I had been using successfully for many months using xubuntu 14.04: it hung at the device mapper stage on 16.04.

The test sequence described here is so that you can reproduce the problem.

[Ivan Zahariev (famzah)]

I was able to get this working by additionally installing "dmsetup". If you make "dmsetup" a dependency for the "tcplay" package, we are all set.

More info here: https://github.com/bwalex/tc-play/issues/71

[Seb35 (seb35)]

Note that there is no issue on Debian because there are these dependencies: tcplay → libdevmapper1.02.1 → dmsetup. On Ubuntu dmsetup is only a recommendation of libdevmapper1.02.1.

Also this bug can be reproduced with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS as well.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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