How Ubuntu startup script deletes everything
bugs.launchpad.net
bugs.launchpad.net
I've had bugs converted to 'wontfix' and 'unconfirmed' in spite of giving detailed info and / or situations where it clearly is a bug.
It shouldn't take a 'thinking over a cup of tea' to recognize this is highly undesirable behaviour, a fix is practically free and very easy, the results of executing that script are potentially very expensive.
It's a bug. Not a feature for the wishlist.
And I never did get why there has to be yet another way to start stuff up in the first place. /etc/inittab, /etc/init.d/ and now 'upstart'...
It doesn't seem to be a great improvement over the previous system but requires a bunch of new stuff to be learned and old stuff to be unlearned. That should come with a clear advantage of sorts and I can't seem to find any.
This is why I'm slowly backing away from anything to do with linux.
Anyone can take care of this bug and release their own patches and spins with any given bug or set of bugs or set or features implemented/removed/whatever in open-source. If you get a flippant maintainer of, say, a component of Windows, you're just going to have wait until one of his bosses decides a given bug is a large enough threat to the company to demand it gets fixed. This can be a very, very long time, especially where only edge cases are affected, where you have no option to do anything but beg someone to listen to you. With open-source software, you can fix it yourself, you can hire someone else to fix it, you can put something else in its place, you can do anything! One of these options is obviously better.
Theoretically, but in practice open source software is decidedly worse at this sort of thing than OS X or Windows. I suspect that the profit motive is a driving factor here. You can tell that this maintainer does not care or lacks the capacity to empathize at all about his users. Maybe because they are not the ones paying the bills?
In my eyes, I'm glad that this bug report is in the wild. I'm glad microsoft employees are waving this around in our faces because look how many lives this bug report will save. Look how many people won't get bit by this bug now that they know about it. On the other hand, I can't explain how many times I've used Microsoft's installers, following the instructions to the T only to wind up with broken software or even yes, trashed filesystems.
Perhaps you're right. Maybe open source software is more buggy than our middle-management-driven alternatives. But at least we aren't afraid to warn people of its faults. I think the fact that we don't need to cover critical bugs like this up to keep profits high says something positive about this model of development.
I speak of incidents I've read about and incidents experienced myself. These are not statistics, but they satisfy me.
> I'm glad microsoft employees are waving this around in our faces
Where? Or is this the standard OSS "everyone who criticizes Linux is a secret Microsoft employee" line of thinking?
> Look how many people won't get bit by this bug now that they know about it
Falsely assuming that a significant number of those with the potential to be affected actually know about it . . .
> following the instructions to the T only to wind up with broken software or even yes, trashed filesystems.
Somehow most other people manage to do it without many problems.
> But at least we aren't afraid to warn people of its faults . . .
I believe Microsoft and Apple's KB systems are more complete and well organized than Ubuntu's bug-tracker.
> critical bugs like this
You may not need to cover them, but you're also the only ones who actually have them in significant number. I prefer an organization that cares enough to prevent the bugs from happening but does not disclose them to one where the bugs are disclosed then ignored with insults.
>> I'm glad microsoft employees are waving this around in our faces
>Where? Or is this the standard OSS "everyone who criticizes Linux is a secret Microsoft employee" line of thinking?
Oops, I forgot to mention my source. That was from the bug report itself, comment 18 -- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/55717... -- in which someone was alerted to the bug because a Microsoft employee poked some fun about it.
> > Look how many people won't get bit by this bug now that they know about it
> Falsely assuming that a significant number of those with the potential to be affected actually know about it . . .
I think most competent system administrators who would invoke such a script (it was not an automatic action, this bug is triggered by explicitly running a script that was introduced in the latest unreleased ubuntu version) probably read either reddit or digg or hackernews and would likely know about this very popular bug by now. Which is an advantage because now they won't be bitten by it.
> Somehow most other people manage to do it without many problems.
Guess I'm not one of them.
> I believe Microsoft and Apple's KB systems are more complete and well organized than Ubuntu's bug-tracker.
Perhaps you're right. You have more experience with them. I haven't even seen their bug trackers, and likely wouldn't have access to them unless I were a Microsoft or Apple employee. That's how most proprietary companies' bug trackers work.
> You may not need to cover them, but you're also the only ones who actually have them in significant number.
Funny, I thought all software was buggy? At least, the stuff I write sure is.
> I prefer an organization that cares enough to prevent the bugs from happening but does not disclose them to one where the bugs are disclosed then ignored with insults.
Fair enough. But to be honest, this is not an organization we're dealing with here. This is not a system we're criticizing here. This is the problem of one maintainer's silly response to a simple problem. No reason to blame the entire system for one maintainer's bad day.
No software is bug free. But I personally would rather either submit a patch (you can do that with open-source software) or poke a maintainer (a living breathing doorway into the code and the development process) than navigate through Apple corporation's or Microsoft corporation's complete and well-organized knowledge bases or bug tracking systems only to find out this programmer might not feel like fixing that bug and there's nothing more I could do.
Oh wait, I guess I contradicted myself there. Bah, you know what I meant; I'm still new to this 'arguing with people over the Internet' thing and you hacker newsies are quite an incredibly perceptive bunch.
If this is what profit motive gets me, I'll stick with "for the love of it" motive any day. There are jerks everywhere, at least with OSS I'm not paying for the privelege.
(The fact I'm using the vendor's stuff wrong is entirely possible, but the training supposedly included in our support package keeps getting delayed so I can't be certain how to properly use it).
The 'after sales support' factor in closed source is a huge one and it is a good indicator of long term success of a company.
Or, how about response to the vulnerabilities exploited in pwn2own? Firefox got fixed in about a week, but Safari is still unpatched.
But I think your comment is still vast overkill. The fact is, I get really, really worried every time I see a BSOD'd airline departures board or worse, an ATM booting up Windows (usually Win 2000). Don't these people know?! That there's another OS out there called (GNU/)Linux and it's fast and free and doesn't have a long tradition of crap engineering?
And then I see this and remember that while Linux is (mostly) well-engineered, it has all sorts of equally well-engineered, completely unmarked "self-destruct" buttons. And if there's anything scarier than Windows near airplanes, it has to be Windows users near Linux near airplanes.
... an all-time great quote
I guess "out of sight, out of mind" works for you.
Did you notice the part where it was fixed with 5 lines in 5 minutes instead of waiting a few months for the vendor ?
I'm writing this on an ubuntu box in a microsoft free house, in case anybody suspects me of astroturfing for ms.
It should be possible to criticize linux and / or state that you are 'leaving the fold' without getting modded in to the ground.
Open source and linux are great imo, but there is still lots that could be done a whole lot better, and maintainer 'king of the realm' attitude is a fairly large problem.
It's all too often true that if your 'itch' isn't the exact same as the maintainers that it will not get scratched.
Sure it is a matter of tone, but downvoting for tone does happen and I am not sure it is a bad thing. As it is he sounds like (NB: not saying he is, just sounds like) some immature fellow passing by from reddit knocking Open Source/Linux without adding any value to the discussion. I would expect a comment like "Yay Apple! Yay Steve Jobs! This is why I don't use OSX" to be downvoted too.
And even without the "yay" bit, his comment doesn't add much and has close to zero information content. It is equivalent to someone saying "this" or "upvoted" or "+ 1" or "me too" to something someone else said.
Such comments do get downvoted on HN. I don't have an opinion either way though I wouldn't care if it got downvoted to -4 or stays at +1. Anything above that would be scary!
We agree on that :)
I tend to look at the factual content of a contribution and less at the tone. It's like the RMS/Miguel de Icaza thing but in miniature, if you 'leave' open source after having used it you're almost worse than if you were a windows user all your life long, and I think the moderation in part demonstrates that. If it's just about the tone that's different, but since 'tone' is hard to gage it's a bad reason to moderate for, unless it is crystal clear that the words are offensive or rude. In this case 'linux' and 'open source' are not people, so they can't be insulted and 'yay open source, yay linux' can be interpreted as showing that not everything is good and great about linux and open source, which is undeniably true.
It's significant in this case because in closed source there is usually a solid ($) reason to keep your customers satisfied, in open source much less so because plenty of the people there do it on a volunteer basis, so you have to be 'happy you got it in the first place'.
Well even with that filter there isn't much "content" to that comment besides "me too". :-)
" 'yay open source, yay linux' can be interpreted as showing that not everything is good and great about linux and open source, which is undeniably true."
Well isn't this true about everything in the world? Not everything is good and great about $X. I (vehemently!) agree, but by itself, that isn't a very useful thing to say. Coupled with the "script kiddie" tone, it is hard to fault downvoters (imo)!
Don't forget daemontools.
Daemontools is nice because it works fine as a init.d replacement, and you can just run the individual programs when appropriate. I use it to start emacs, offlineimap, etc., when I log in for the first time.
daph:/etc/service# svstat *
apache: up (pid 20546) 7315393 seconds
dndr: up (pid 32629) 3757174 seconds
getmail: up (pid 31632) 4487516 seconds
momo: up (pid 22310) 16934 seconds
mush: up (pid 10708) 222304 seconds
p9: down 7991823 seconds, normally up
u9fs: up (pid 13547) 1968001 seconds
win2k: up (pid 3291) 8180332 secondsAnd frankly some of the comments in that bug are going the route of personal attacks against the maintainter, which I don't think is very productive.
It's the people that haven't experienced it yet that are at risk, and you can't tell those 'don't do that then' preemptively.
I guess it was really just a case of a bad day after all but he handled it gracefully in the end. This recent post clarifies things: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/55717...
Not dissing the people who try to find the errors and fiddle around - they are the ones who advance the state of Linux in the long run. But it's probably a good idea to use a test system for fiddling around.
All that has happened was that didn't get properly referenced and the changes to priority suggested that the bug wasn't being addressed. Someone has just jumped on that ;)
It happens.
On Wed, 2010-04-07 at 14:12 +0000, Thomas Krause wrote:
> The problem is, that you don't know this script is
> dangerous before you executed it.
Then you should not execute it.
Scott
--
Scott James Remnant
<email address hidden>
So, just to clarify that:
What you are basically saying is that the manpage stating
> start JOB... > Requests that the named jobs be started. The status of the jobs will be output to standard output until > they are succesfully running, or in the case of tasks, until they have completed.
should in fact be read as: "might either start the job or delete all your data, and we neither check, warn or document regarding this issue anywhere visibly"? Seriously?
I think it's an interesting aspect of the different Linux distributions. Someone else mentioned Gentoo being similar to Ubuntu in this regard, and I would agree...though it takes it to such an extreme that it's hard for me to even take it seriously as an OS. At least the end result of Ubuntu's obstinance is pretty solid, even if every new release has some weird quirks that I just can't figure out how they made it through QC (and more often than I'm comfortable with, those quirks are intentional).
if [ -z $MOUNTPOINT ]; then
echo "MOUNTPOINT not defined. Not deleting your file system.";
exit(1);
fi
Then around 2005 or so, an update to Apache replaced my httpd.conf with the default and deleted everything in htdocs and added a default index.html. Lots of people complained and the Gentoo maintainers said anyone not using virtual hosts was wrong, so it was not their fault the user's lost all their data and configuration on an upgrade.
After that, I started noticing more and more arguments from maintainers and users. Frankly, I am glad I am no longer using Gentoo and fighting their system. And I am glad I don't use Ubuntu and fighting their system either.
(Though to be fair, good luck installing Windows or OS X with a 256M memory stick and a wireless router.)
It's hard to believe that Gentoo wiped out your web directory, but I can believe it. However, I am careful to make backups before I make a drastic upgrade. For example, when upgrading PostgreSQL I always make sure to back up my dbs before hand, though I've never had an issue with it wiping out. Not yet anyway.
I had backups, but I actually never applied them because I decided to create a new website instead.
Simply telling people to "don't do that" is not an adequate approach because people make mistakes, it is part of human nature.
Another non-serious example. I used a dual-boot Linux&Vista laptop. Innocently tried to update Ubuntu. This changed the boot loader to Ubuntu only (removed the Windows menu).
This may be fine for me, but it fails the grandmother test (or any other test of a normal casual computer user). Aren't updates tested before they are added?
So - since this happened and I can say with some certainty that it wasn't by design - have you opened a bug report about it? (I know that the unfortunate tone of this specific bug report is unfortunate but most are handled in a friendly manner)
I suspect that any dual-boot configuration would fail such a test, though I do admit to being out of touch with any computer user who might be considered normal.
1. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/55717...
From: http://www.ubuntu.com/education
"Above all, Ubuntu is set apart from other operating systems by its unwavering focus on simplicity and ease of use. Ubuntu's motto is "Linux for Human Beings" and every development decision and application has that goal in mind."
http://www.fewt.com/2010/03/bye-ubuntu-it-could-have-been-fu...
Bug reports should hold information that explains how to fix the bug or how to reproduce it. A complaint that says "me too! hurry up and fix it!" adds nothing useful and pollutes the rest of the helpful posts there.
Post your "me too!" comments on the Ubuntu forums. That's the place for them. Failing that, the "This bug affects me too [change]" button is more than willing to listen.
Sure the maintainer is being a bit lazy about the issue but everyone always thinks their problems are the most important in the world. Everyone criticizing him is failing to question whether he may have more critical bugs, ones where a stupid user isn't involved.
It's a little unexpected.
Even after reading the script, you may not catch the fact that not setting the right environment variable causes massive damage--it's not documented anywhere.
Even if he had more important stuff to do in the meantime, it's no reason to be a jerk about it. If things like that don't get corrected the first time it happens, the history will repeat, but you'll be the one running the script the next time.
About the actual question: Why would you run any command without knowing its purpose? -- User knew the command's purpose. He didn't know that a parameter is required though. It was not documented apart from the source.
Would you expect to lose your data, all your data, when running '/etc/init.d/mounted-tmp start'?
Thought so.