/var/run/shibboleth musings

[Russ Allbery]

Kristof BAJNOK <bajnokk at niif.hu> writes:
> On Tuesday 03 February 2009 Ferenc Wagner wrote:

>> /var/run/shibboleth is part of the libapache2-mod-shib2 package.  Shibd
>> stores its pid file, communication socket and cached metadata files
>> there.  However, /var/run can be a tmpfs (it's an option in
>> /etc/default/rcS), which means that this directory may be missing on
>> reboot (I guess it still doesn't make it RC, though; or does it?)
>
> If the /var/run/shibboleth directory is missing, /etc/init.d/shibd start
> fails silently but returns success. That's a wierd error from a user's
> perspective and requires some experience to handle.
>
> The fix is a 3-liner, absolutely obvious and can possibly avoid a number
> of future user complaints.

I think that having /var/run be tmpfs is relatively rare on Debian, so
this problem will primarily affect Ubuntu (where it's the default).
However, we should definitely also fix it in Debian, since it's a valid
configuration.

It's too late for the lenny release at this point since it's not RC and
we're in deep-freeze for a release hopefully within two or three weeks,
but it, like everything else, will be in the backports.  :)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>