[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#438529: sysvinit: /sbin/runlevel output confused in single-user

[Martin J. Carter]

Package: sysvinit
Version: 2.86.ds1-38
Severity: normal


This is complicated; please bear with me.

If I boot from cold to runlevel 2, everything is fine; runlevel
reports "N 2" as expected.

If I boot from cold to runlevel 1 (to monkey around as root), runlevel
reports "1 S", where I'd expect "N 1" or "S 1".  If I then proceed to
runlevel 2, portmap is not launched from rc2.d, and NIS and NFS
(amongst other things) break in spectacular ways.  If instead I
hand-launch portmap at runlevel 1, then proceed to runlevel 2, the
remainder of the boot succeeds, and runlevel reports "S 2".

I deduce that portmap is being launched from rcS.d, then killed from
rc1.d; then /etc/init.d/rc sees "S 2" reported by runlevel, finds
rcS.d/S43portmap rather than rc1.d/K81portmap, thinks portmap must be
running already, and refuses to launch it.  I can kludge round this by
renaming rcS.d/S43portmap to rcS.d/S43portmap0, but now I've looked
closer, it would appear that the underlying bug is in runlevel, or
wherever it gets its information from.  The bug in runlevel is there
in sarge, but didn't matter as its /etc/init.d/rc wasn't so picky.

But then again, I'm aware changing what runlevel reports may break
other things.  Feel free to reassign this to portmap.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-5-k7
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)

Versions of packages sysvinit depends on:
ii  initscripts            2.86.ds1-38       Scripts for initializing and shutt
ii  libc6                  2.3.6.ds1-13etch2 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libselinux1            1.32-3            SELinux shared libraries
ii  libsepol1              1.14-2            Security Enhanced Linux policy lib
ii  sysv-rc                2.86.ds1-38       System-V-like runlevel change mech
ii  sysvinit-utils         2.86.ds1-38       System-V-like utilities

sysvinit recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information