TKLBAM not restoring symlinks properly

[Jeremy Davis]

Fairly extensively discussed in this forum thread: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/forum/support/20111126/tklbam-not-restoring-symbolic-links-links

[Brad Rhoads (bdrhoa)]

This is a blocker! Impossible to turn off a tomcat appliance until this is fixed

[Liraz (liraz-siri)]

I traced back this issue to an obscure Python bug that effects how shutil.move works when moving symlinks between filesystems:

http://bugs.python.org/issue9993

This only effected tklbam-restore's behavior on small and medium sized EC2 instances (not Micro) since 27/10/2011 when we started mount --bind /tmp to /mnt. Restores to non-EC2 TurnKey installations worked fine. Also, there was never a problem with the backups themselves, just the restore process.

Bottom line: I committed a fix, and we'll push out an automatic update tomorrow so that everyone gets a new version of tklbam automatically. After that restores should work just fine everywhere.

[Jeremy Davis (jedmeister)]

Sounds like it was a tricky one! Good work Liraz!

[Jeremy Davis (jedmeister)]

Looks like the bugfix introduced a regression: https://bugs.launchpad.net/turnkeylinux/+bug/946454

[Liraz (liraz-siri)]

It wasn't a regression. More like a dormant bug in mailman being triggered by the turnkey-pylib update. Just goes to show there's no such thing as a totally safe change.