[Bug 927803] Re: Fails to launch recovery menu when (at least) Postfix installed

[Steve Langasek]

I think this is a bug in both postfix and friendly-recovery.

- resolvconf will always be run in early boot, to ensure that
/etc/resolv.conf is available ASAP - *before* the root filesystem is
mounted read-write.  Any resolvconf hooks, such as /etc/resolvconf
/update-libc.d/postfix, *must* account for this and not exit non-zero if
the filesystem is not yet writable.  (The hook can and should be a no-op
at this point in the boot, because the postfix init script which runs
later will do its own copy of /etc/resolv.conf into the chroot.)

- friendly-recovery should not care about the exit status of the initctl
emit command.  It should still wait for all dependent events to trigger
in order to not race, but it should not care if one of the dependent
jobs has failed.

So this is a medium-severity bug in friendly-recovery, and a high-
severity bug in postfix.

** Also affects: postfix (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** Changed in: friendly-recovery (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided => Medium

** Changed in: friendly-recovery (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Triaged

** Changed in: postfix (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Triaged

** Changed in: postfix (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided => High

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/927803

Title:
  Fails to launch recovery menu when (at least) Postfix installed

Status in “friendly-recovery” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “postfix” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  I have two computers affected by this and one that is not, each
  running Precise. I've tracked down the cause, but I'm not sure which
  of the components involved (friendly-recovery, resolvconf, postfix and
  upstart) is the culprit, so I'll file this for friendly-recovery which
  is at least severly affected. Feel free to correct the target with
  better insight.

  Steps to reproduce:
  0. Have the 'postfix' and 'resolvconf' packages installed.
  1. Boot into recovery mode.

  What happens:
  The boot proceeds in nonsplash (text) mode, but in the end the recovery menu fails to show up. Instead the graphical greeter is brought up.

  What I expect to happen:
  For the recovery menu to show up so I can use it.

  The cause:
  For debugging this, I first enabled logging for friendly-recovery.conf. That log implicated resolvconf, so I enabled logging for resolvconf, and that in turn revealed this:

  cp: cannot create regular file `/var/spool/postfix/etc/resolv.conf':
  Read-only file system

  So I checked, and indeed postfix wasn't there on my laptop which
  wasn't affected. It seems that due to the read-only file system, the
  resolvconf upstart job fails, which in turn leads to the resolvconf-
  dependent friendly-recovery job to also fail.

  The workaround:
  Uninstall postfix if you can afford to.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
  Package: friendly-recovery 0.2.19
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-14.23-generic 3.2.3
  Uname: Linux 3.2.0-14-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 1.91-0ubuntu1
  Architecture: amd64
  CheckboxSubmission: 09ae689090491ca53449589269e4bfd8
  CheckboxSystem: edda5d4f616ca792bf437989cb597002
  Date: Mon Feb  6 20:36:29 2012
  EcryptfsInUse: Yes
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
  PackageArchitecture: all
  SourcePackage: friendly-recovery
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-01-17 (20 days ago)
  mtime.conffile..etc.init.friendly.recovery.conf: 2012-02-06T20:17:28.034920

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