base-files postinstall recurses into /var

[Morio Taneda]

Binary package hint: base-files

Ubuntu 8.04.2
base-files 4.0.1ubuntu5.8.04.4

moriot@xxxxxx:~$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall (or install, or upgrade) base-files
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 59 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 0B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Setting up base-files (4.0.1ubuntu5.8.04.4) ...

lsof -p `pidof find` shows working directory and open directory handles under /var (/var/volumes/... which I think is site-specific).

This may seem related to 297595, 306973 but both of these say that find is searching through /etc. However I cannot find any links under my /etc pointing to directories in /var (searched using find -type l | xargs namei | grep var), only files.

The affected machine's /var/volumes contains 250GB of user data -- other installations may have far more. The argument that it's better to be thorough because this upgrade only happens once, seems a bit out of balance here. Also, base-files has no business changing permissions in arbitrary directories containing user data.

At least there should be a message printed at the start of postinst stating that this upgrade could take a while...

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

We were actually relatively careful to touch only directories the packaging system knew about, I thought. Here's the relevant code. I can't see where this could recurse into /var/volumes; could you look over the following and see if any of the mentioned directories might contain symlinks into /var/volumes? I suspect that this is specific to your system somehow but I don't yet see how. Thanks in advance.

  NINER_NINER_PATHS=" \
       /boot \
       /etc \
       /usr/lib/locale \
       /var/backups \
       /var/cache/apt \
       /var/cache/debconf \
       /var/cache/fontconfig \
       /var/cache/fonts \
       /var/cache/ldconfig \
       /var/cache/anthy \
       /var/lib/apt \
       /var/lib/dpkg \
       /var/lib/belocs \
       /var/lib/gconf \
       /var/lib/defoma \
       /var/lib/locales \
       /var/log/installer "

  NINER_NINER_SYMLINKS=" \
       /initrd.img \
       /vmlinuz \
       /cdrom \
       /media/cdrom \
       /etc/alternatives \
       /usr/share/fonts \
       /var/lib/anthy \
       /var/lib/defoma "

  find -L $NINER_NINER_PATHS -gid 999 -print0 |
       xargs -0rt chgrp 0
  find $NINER_NINER_SYMLINKS -gid 999 -print0 |
       xargs -0rt chgrp -h 0
  find /media -maxdepth 1 -name "cdrom[0-9]*" -gid 999 -print0 |
       xargs -0rt chgrp 0

  find /lib/modules -maxdepth 2 -name "modules.*" -gid 999 -print0 |
       xargs -0rt chgrp 0

[Morio Taneda (morio-taneda)]

Yes it's /var/backups. The symlink is specific to this machine though
other hosts in the company had been set up with the backups actually
under /var/backups. Those may have been ubuntu, debian or CentOS (I'm
not in charge of those). Should we avoid /var/backups?

Colin Watson wrote:
> We were actually relatively careful to touch only directories the
> packaging system knew about, I thought. Here's the relevant code. I
> can't see where this could recurse into /var/volumes; could you look
> over the following and see if any of the mentioned directories might
> contain symlinks into /var/volumes? I suspect that this is specific to
> your system somehow but I don't yet see how. Thanks in advance.
>
> NINER_NINER_PATHS=" \
> /boot \
> /etc \
> /usr/lib/locale \
> /var/backups \
> /var/cache/apt \
> /var/cache/debconf \
> /var/cache/fontconfig \
> /var/cache/fonts \
> /var/cache/ldconfig \
> /var/cache/anthy \
> /var/lib/apt \
> /var/lib/dpkg \
> /var/lib/belocs \
> /var/lib/gconf \
> /var/lib/defoma \
> /var/lib/locales \
> /var/log/installer "
>
> NINER_NINER_SYMLINKS=" \
> /initrd.img \
> /vmlinuz \
> /cdrom \
> /media/cdrom \
> /etc/alternatives \
> /usr/share/fonts \
> /var/lib/anthy \
> /var/lib/defoma "
>
> find -L $NINER_NINER_PATHS -gid 999 -print0 |
> xargs -0rt chgrp 0
> find $NINER_NINER_SYMLINKS -gid 999 -print0 |
> xargs -0rt chgrp -h 0
> find /media -maxdepth 1 -name "cdrom[0-9]*" -gid 999 -print0 |
> xargs -0rt chgrp 0
>
> find /lib/modules -maxdepth 2 -name "modules.*" -gid 999 -print0 |
> xargs -0rt chgrp 0
>
>
> ** Changed in: base-files (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Incomplete
>
> ** Changed in: base-files (Ubuntu)
> Assignee: (unassigned) => Colin Watson (cjwatson)
>
>