Re: [gentoo-desktop] Desktop nearly unbootable!! Need HELP!!

[Lindsay Haisley]

Thus spake Rémi Cardona on Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 03:05:33AM CDT
> Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> >Seems that I'm not the only one with this problem.  There are several
> >fixes which collectively seem to put things back to normal.  See
> >http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99564
>
> Workarounds are suggested in the bug you pointed out. Just comment out
> the udev entries that use non-exsting groups such as "tpm".

After I found the bug report I applied several of the posted fixes for the 
problem and left a few comments.  Things are back to normal here.

My main issue here is the question of how such a condition can occur.  I have 
USE=ldap set, and a Gentoo ebuild at some point put ldap into the 
authentication methods for passwd, shadow and group, probably because this flag 
was set when glibc was last emerged.  Whatever happened, I ended up with udevd 
trying to find an ldap server before either the network or the local ldap 
server were up and running.  This shouldn't ever be allowed to happen.

> On the forums, several people made shell scripts that switched between
> two nsswitch.conf during bootup and after. This really is an ugly hack.

It's the UNIX way ;-)

> Another option is to put timeouts in ldap.conf. It's barely documented
> but someone pointed this out in the forums.

Here are a couple of thoughts.  There's a single ldap USE flag spec'd for 
Gentoo.  There are, however, several widely different ways in which ldap can be 
used.  For instance, although I have ldap in my USE flags for my desktop 
system, I don't want to use ldap authentication, nor do I want the system to 
even try to use it.  I do want ldap capabilities in applications such as 
evolution, and ldap clients, and proper schemas installed by various such 
applilcations which can take advantage of them.  Perhaps rather than a single 
"ldap" USE flag, there need to be at least a couple - "ldap-auth", 
"ldap-client", etc.

> >This is really nasty.  Had it happened on one of my servers, one of which
> >runs gentoo, it would have cost me customers!
>
> Thus the need to try things out before updating production servers :)
> Safe business practice ihmo, although this bug really a PITA.

One of the disadvantages of Gentoo is that it follows the open source maxim 
"release early, release often" pretty literally.  The choices are either to 
keep an identical non-production server around as a test bed or to not try to 
keep up2date on stuff once the system is stable.  I do live dangerously, and 
reserve the right to whine about it when I get my butt bitten ;-)  One of the 
advantages of Gentoo is that the dev community and forums are generally very 
helpful in solving stuff when things break.  bugs.gentoo.org is a great 
resource to which I successfully turn more often than I would wish.

> I read someplace this was going to be fixed in later versions of nss_ldap.

Yeah, this bug has been outstanding for many months.  I put a version cap in 
packages.mask on nss_ldap and a comment referencing the bug report.  It looks 
as if Greg KH and other devs can't quite agree on where the responsibility lies 
for this one.

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "Fighting against human |     PGP public key
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                      |      (Pamela Jones)     |
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