mdcheck_* timers refer non-existing binary mdcheck

[Moritz Bunkus]

The mdadm package comes with two systemd timers that are activated automatitcally, mdcheck_start.timer and mdcheck_continue.timer. The corresponding services try to run /usr/share/mdadm/mdcheck which doesn't exist. The units then fail, and no RAID check is run.

[0 mosu@lelldorin ~] grep ExecStart /lib/systemd/system/mdcheck_*.service
/lib/systemd/system/mdcheck_continue.service:ExecStart=/usr/share/mdadm/mdcheck --continue --duration $MDADM_CHECK_DURATION
/lib/systemd/system/mdcheck_start.service:ExecStart=/usr/share/mdadm/mdcheck --duration $MDADM_CHECK_DURATION
[0 mosu@lelldorin ~] dpkg -L mdadm | grep mdcheck
/lib/systemd/system/mdcheck_continue.service
/lib/systemd/system/mdcheck_continue.timer
/lib/systemd/system/mdcheck_start.service
/lib/systemd/system/mdcheck_start.timer
[0 mosu@lelldorin ~] ls /usr/share/mdadm/mdcheck
ls: cannot access '/usr/share/mdadm/mdcheck': No such file or directory

Description: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS
Release: 20.04

ii mdadm 4.1-5ubuntu1 amd64 tool to administer Linux MD arrays (software RAID)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Nathan Rennie-Waldock (nathan-renniewaldock)]

This was a packaging error in Debian that has been fixed in mdadm 4.1-6 (released a week ago). Can we get that merged? Or at least debian/rules updated to install misc/mdcheck.

This is actually serious and could cause data loss if an array member develops bad sectors as automatically checking the array is nonfunctional.

[Eric Desrochers (slashd)]

This has been fixed in Groovy and Focal.
See (LP: # 1852747)