[conspire] Other notes from the Debian 5.0.1/Lenny to 6.0/Squeeze upgrade

[Ruben Safir]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 05:59:58PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Oh, and one last thing:  I should explain this bit.
> 
> > An earlier judgement error (early 2010) had left my system partly
> > on Debian-stable and partly on Debian-testing, which is a really bad
> > idea.  A couple of things were unhappy, but I'd not carried out the
> > steps to forward-revision everything to Debian-testing out of a fear
> > that there would be considerable breakage and require me to do a
> > marathon of emergency system rebuilding.
> 
> What possessed me to do such as stupid thing?
> 
> It goes back to what happened in April 2008.  Shortly before I 
> was due to go into the hospital for surgery, a spring lightning storm 
> fried my server, y'all may recall.  My 1998-era VA Research Corp. model
> 500 machine was quite toasty, and really nothing was salvageable.  My 
> best and most recent backup was files I'd rsync'd to Deirdre's
> Solaris-based virtual-host-of-sorts at an ISP.  So, just after rapidly
> building a new Debian-stable system on the current VA Linux model 2230
> hardware, I rsync'd the files back -- and discovered to my dismay that
> Solaris had munged all the file ownerships, because the rsync backup had
> not been conducted as the root user.
> 
> I fixed everything that I could, and deployed the almost 100% rebuilt
> machine a few hours after the old one fried.
> 
> However, there was the strangest thing:  The BIND9 DNS nameserver
> refused to start.  This was A Big Problem for me -- so I kept playing
> with it, and eventually discovered a bizarre workaround:
> 
> _If_ I manually executed /usr/sbin/named, which is the daemon binary, 
> and let it instantly die because it had no environment, conffiles, etc.
> invoked with it, _then_ running '/etc/init.d/bind9 start' worked.
> Bizarre, eh?  I kept reading logfiles and screwing with it trying to
> figure out what was broken and why that worked -- to no avail.  So, I
> simply got used to running /usr/sbin/named before the daemon would work.
> 
> However, that's no way to run a server.  One day, in frustration and
> fatigue, even while knowing that it was a strategic mistake, I thought:
> 'Suppose there's a bug in the recent BIND9 releases on Debian-stable
> that I happen to trigger.  Maybe it's fixed in later versions not yet
> available on -stable.'  So, that was when I did the unwise thing,
> repointing /etc/apt/sources.list to -unstable, and upgrading BIND9.
> 
> Which did not fix the problem -- and also pulled down problematic 
> cutting-edge versions of packages as dependencies, notably a glibc that
> gave a lot of software on -stable indigestion of various sorts.  But I 
> didn't touch that until yesterday, because I suspected it would lead to
> marathon efforts and just wasn't thrilled about the prospect.
> 
> 
> The punch line:  In the middle of dealing with yesterday's problems, I
> figured out the original BIND9 problem.  More or less.
> 
> It had to do with all of those backup files on the Solaris remote host.
> Because Solaris had munged a lot of the ownerships, among the things
> that got the wrong ownership was directory /var/run/named/ .  Which is
> where the BIND9 daemon writes its pid file.  Unfortunately, it tried to
> do that as user 'bind', group 'bind', while /var/run/named was owned by
> root:root.
> 
> Somehow, manually running /usr/sbin/named was clearing?  chowning? the
> pid file left over in /var/run/named and making it possible for the
> BIND9 startup script to write a new one there, without which startup 
> silently failed.
> 
> I've chowned /var/run/named/ to bind:bind, and now things seem to be
> working correctly.
> 
> 

I have weird problems with bind9 all the time and always eventually end
up downloading the source, compiling by hand and rewriting the init
script for my own purposes.  They are running it now in a chroot jail,
but I'd be suprised if I'm telling you anything you don't already know.

Ruben

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