Ryan,

Yes you are right. My passwd/group files has been alive for a long time ..

Case can be closed.

/n

Quoting Ryan Harper <email address hidden>:

> addgroup is a perl script, so you can inspect it to see what's going on.
> You can get additional information about the error running with:
>
> sudo VERBOSE=1 addgroup --system ntp
>
> I think what we're seeing is that your ntp group is a user group (gid >=
> 1000) instead of a system group (gid < 1000).
>
>> From your output above, it looks like you're hitting this logic:
>
>
> if ($action eq "addsysgroup") {
>
>     # Check if requested group already exists and we can exit safely
>     my $ret = existing_group_ok($new_name, $new_gid);
>
>     if ($ret == 3) {
>         print STDERR "$0: " if $verbose;
>         printf STDERR (gtx("The group `%s' already exists as a  
> system group. Exiting.\n"), $new_name) if $verbose;
>         exit RET_OK;
>     }
>
>     if ($ret == 1) {
>         print STDERR "$0: " if $verbose;
>         printf STDERR (gtx("The group `%s' already exists and is not  
> a system group. Exiting.\n"), $new_name) if $verbose;
>         exit RET_OBJECT_ALREADY_EXISTS;
>     }
>
>
> So, you're exiting 1 due to the gid of group ntp being > 1000.  The  
> fix here would be to apt-get remove --purge ntp ; the --purge flag  
> will trigger the ntp.postrm script to remove the group first.  Then  
> when you re-install, it will install the ntp group with --system  
> flag and allocate a GID under <1000.
>
> See if that helps you moving forward.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1372051
>
> Title:
>   ntp postinst user/group add commands are not idempotent
>
> Status in ntp package in Ubuntu:
>   Incomplete
>
> Bug description:
>   At do release upgrade from 12.04.05 to 14.04.01, the ntp package failed:
>   Errors were encountered while processing:
>    ntp
>   Error in function:
>
>
>   A fatal error occurred
>
>   Please report this as a bug and include the files
>   /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log and /var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log in
>   your report. The upgrade has aborted.
>   Your original sources.list was saved in
>   /etc/apt/sources.list.distUpgrade.
>
>   SystemError: E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
>
>
>   Could not install the upgrades
>
>   The upgrade has aborted. Your system could be in an unusable state. A
>   recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a).
>
>   Please report this bug in a browser at
>   http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+filebug
>   and attach the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/ to the bug report.
>   installArchives() failed
>
>   Setting up ntp (1:4.2.6.p5+dfsg-3ubuntu2) ...
>   dpkg: error processing package ntp (--configure):
>    subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
>   Errors were encountered while processing:
>    ntp
>
>   Upgrade complete
>
>   The upgrade has completed but there were errors during the upgrade
>   process.
>
>
>   In /var/lib/dpkg/info/ntp.postinst the add group / adduser  
> commands fail due to already existing group / user.
>   Appended “ || /bin/true” to those lines, and “dpkg —configure ntp”  
> succeeded.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ntp/+bug/1372051/+subscriptions


-- 
/n