Bedrock Linux 1.0alpha3 Bosco Known Issues

• /etc File Sync Issue
• Difficulty Statically Compiling Busybox
• Man pages do not work across clients
• Debian-based clients: statoverride problems

/etc File Sync Issue

Individual files, when "shared" via bind mounts, cannot be moved over. This is particularly problematic for files such as /etc/passwd which are normally updated by creating a new file and moving it over the previous one.

Work arounds:

• You could share these files and manually "update" them. If the "groupadd" command is run, it will fail and leave a temporary file such as "/etc/group+" behind. You can cat this file over the normal "/etc/group" file to finalize the command yourself, like so:

  cat /etc/group+ > /etc/group && rm /etc/group+
  

• You could avoid sharing these files files through the brclients.conf system and manually sync them when one changes. For example, if "groupadd" is run, you could run the following:

  cp /etc/group /tmp/ && brl cp /tmp/group /etc/group && rm /tmp/group
  

This assumes /tmp is shared between clients.

Work is underway to create a daemon to automate this second option. See here for its current state, see here.

See here for issue tracker page for the issue.

Difficulty Statically Compiling Busybox

Difficulty statically compiling busybox have been noted, somewhat dependent on the client/installer host used. This is caused by conscious limitations placed in libraries available in many Linux distributions, particularly glibc.

Work arounds:

• One of the changes since Momo is that Bosco supports using pre-compiled static busybox from another Linux distribution, such as (infact, preferably) from a client. You just have to make sure it meets a a few requirements.
• Compile against a different library, such as uclibc (a sister project of busybox) or musl. If you'd like to try using uclibc, look into buildroot, a tool to aid with such things. If you'd rather try musl, note that the sabotage linux project uses musl to compile busybox and may be worth looking into.

Man pages do not work across clients

While Bedrock Linux ensures executables work across clients, no work has yet been done to get man pages to work similarly. See here for the issue tracker.

Debian-based clients: statoverride problems

Occasionally, apt/dpkg will complain about issues with "statoverride". This most likely occurs because it expects a daemon should be running, but it is not. This can be fixed in this instance by simply removing the contents of /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride. Simply leave an empy file in that location. This may come up repeatedly - no work has yet been done to find a permanent solution. See here for the issue tracker.