Upgrade of avahi-daemon restarts it although it's desactivated

[Kelson]

I have Gutsy.

The avahi-daemon generates problems with name resolution by me, so I have deactivated it with the system >admin > service dialog box.
This morning was an update of the avahi-daemon (0.6.20-2ubuntu3) which seems to have reactivated it silently because my problem have reappeared.
The system >admin > service dialog box showed a desactivated (check out) service... but check in and again and again check out and press the OK button has resolved the problem.

I have had to do that this morning on two ubuntu Gutsy computers.

[bugmenot (bugmenot)]

confirmed: ubuntu 7.10, ubuntu-desktop
confirmed: ubuntu 8.04, ubuntu-desktop and xubuntu-desktop
for a list of possibly affected services,
 grep -e "invoke-rc.d" /var/lib/dpkg/info/*postinst

Every upgrade or reinstall of an affected service triggers this bug, if the service was disabled with services-admin application.
The services' postinst maintainer script runs invoke-rc.d, which in turn starts the service if the service link in the current runlevel is missing (deleted by services-admin).

Reproduced this way:
# terminal
user@ubuntu:~$ runlevel
N 2
user@ubuntu:~$ ls /etc/rc2.d/*avahi-daemon
/etc/rc2.d/S18avahi-daemon
# menu System>Administration>Services: "disable" avahi-daemon
user@ubuntu:~$ ls /etc/rc2.d/*avahi-daemon
ls: /etc/rc2.d/*avahi-daemon: No such file or directory
user@ubuntu:~$ ps ax | grep avahi
 9666 pts/1 S+ 0:00 grep avahi
user@ubuntu:~$ sudo invoke-rc.d avahi-daemon start
[sudo] password for user:
 * Starting Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Daemon avahi-daemon [ OK ]
user@ubuntu:~$ ps ax | grep avahi
 9699 ? Ss 0:00 avahi-daemon: registering [ubuntu.local]
 9700 ? Ss 0:00 avahi-daemon: chroot helper
 9707 pts/1 R+ 0:00 grep avahi

This bug only shows up with deleted links.
It is not restricted to avahi-daemon.
Reproduced with atd, avahi-daemon, cupsys, sysklogd (others not tested).

invoke-rc.d acts as expected (does not start the service) if the service was correctly disabled (link renamed to Knn...).
This can be done using an undocumented feature of services-admin:
Right-click on the service, in the advanced settings select "stop".
Do not select "ignore" here: the services' link will then be deleted and cause this bug to happen again on next upgrade or reinstall.

One of invoke-rc.d (package sysv-rc) and services-admin (package gnome-system-tools) is clearly misbehaving here. I vote for services-admin, because of its persistent habit of deleting and mixing up links - see bug #19034 for some historical evidence.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for the report, it has been some time without any response or feedback in this bug report and we are wondering if this is still an issue for you with the latest release of Ubuntu the Natty Narwhal, May you please test with that version and comment back if you're still having or not the issue? Please have a look at http://www.ubuntu.com/download to know how to install that version.Thanks in advance.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

We're closing this bug since it is has been some time with no response from the original reporter. However, if the issue still exists please feel free to reopen with the requested information. Also, if you could, please test against the latest development version of Ubuntu, since this confirms the bug is one we may be able to pass upstream for help.