dpkg-reconfigure udev deletes udevadm

[Ken Arnold]

Binary package hint: udev

Somehow in a tangled intrepid->jaunty upgrade, /sbin/udevadm went missing. This caused keyboard and mouse to be dead at GDM login window (initial input layer probe fail?) and lots of other things to be borked (barely any modules loaded, /dev/null permission errors from the shell).

Fix was to dpkg --install /var/cache/apt/archives/udev*.

But how in the world did this happen?

The only seriously unusual thing I did in the upgrade was run sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a afterwards. (I did that because I noticed that flashplayer, among other things, had some failures in config during the install. Reconfigure fixed that.)

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
NonfreeKernelModules: openafs nvidia
Package: udev 141-1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: udev
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic i686

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could you please add the log files from your distribution upgrade located in '/var/log/dist-upgrade/' to this bug report as separate attachments? Thanks in advance.

[Ken Arnold (kenneth-arnold)]

Log files attached. The only reference to udevadm that I see is the adding and removing of the install diversion. The diverted-to file didn't exist when the problem occurred (the only udev file in /sbin was /sbin/udevd).

[Stefan Fuchs (snfuchs)]

Well, I had the same symptoms on my laptop:
No touchpad, keyboard or mouse input available in kdm. Login with ssh worked, after a lot of -bash: /dev/null: Permission denied errors. So I finally found this bug and indeed /sbin/udevadm was not there. Reinstalling the udev package solved the problem for me as well.
I also did an upgrade from intrepid->jaunty and ran dpkg-reconfigure -a afterwards, in the hope to fix some locale problems (locale returns LANG= , instead of LANG=de_DE.UTF-8). I'm sure the error occured only after I ran dpkg-reconfigure -a, as a previous reboot and login went smoothly.

[Ken Arnold (kenneth-arnold)]

I think we can nail the blame on the dpkg-reconfigure, because likewise my first bootup was fine, and it only broke after that.

And sure enough, if /var/lib/dpkg/info/udev.postinst is called with `configure`, it runs `enable_udevadm`, which unconditionally runs `rm -f /sbin/udevadm`. Gotcha.

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

The enable_udevadm function should be guarded with if [ -e /sbin/udevadm.upgrade ]

also we might want to check for DEBCONF_RECONFIGURE=1 for configure in general?

[Stephan Rügamer (sruegamer)]

Confirmed.

How to reproduce:

1. Install a clean jaunty system
2. apt-get dist-upgrade with new udev from updates
3. after that dpkg-reconfigure -a -f noninteractive
4. read something along the lines "no divertion of /sbin/udevadm, removed non"
5. check ls /sbin/udev* only udevd is still there.

Problem is inside the udev.postinst somewhere around enable_udev()

Read that as additional info :)

Regards,

\sh

PS: Thx Scott

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package udev - 143-3

---------------
udev (143-3) karmic; urgency=low

  * debian/udev.{install,preinst,postinst,postrm}: /etc/scsi_id.config was
    dropped upstream, remove from package and on upgrade.

  * debian/udev.postinst: Only divert udevadm back if diverted away, don't
    on reconfigure, etc. LP: #366185.

udev (143-2) karmic; urgency=low

  * Update to GIT HEAD:
    - Bug fixes
    - ATA devices switched the property from ID_BUS=scsi to ID_BUS=ata.
    - Private properties may be set starting with "."

udev (143-1) karmic; urgency=low

  * New upstream release:
    - event processes are now re-used to improve performance
    - libudev no longer has unstable API
    - merged udev-extras tools and rules

  * debian/control:
    - udev Conflicts and Replaces udev-extras versions up to current.
    - merged Build-Depends from udev-extras
    - added Build-Depends on gtk-doc-tools for documentation generation.
    - copied details for libgudev-1.0-0 and libgudev-1.0-dev from udev-extras
  * debian/rules:
    - replace --exec-prefix with --sbindir, --libdir, --libexecdir and
      --with-rootlibdir
    - replace --disable-shared with --enable-static for the udeb, the
      result is the same
  * debian/libgudev-1.0-0.install, debian/libgudev-1.0-dev.install:
    - copy from udev-extras

 -- Scott James Remnant <email address hidden> Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:03:04 +0100

[JC Hulce (soaringsky)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug. This issue has been fixed in newer versions of Ubuntu, and Jaunty is EOL, so I am closing this bug task.