openSUSE 11.2 installer doesn't install initscript

Hi,

This is a bug report - please forward it to the people who do the packaging for PostgresPlus Standard Server.

We use PostgresPlus Standard Server on SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 and are pretty happy with it. Recently we tried to install PostgresPlus on an openSUSE 11.2 x86_64 machine (using the same 8.4.1-2 installer that works on SLES 11) - the installer runs fine without errors, however the initscript that should be installed at /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 is missing.

Hopefully it'll be an easy fix for you that you can get in for the next release.

Hi,

Have you used the same installer on both machines? If yes, can you attach the installation log (/tmp/install-postgresql.log) for the machine where init scripts failed to install..

Hi Sachin,

I've attached both install-postgresql.log and install-postgresplus.log - both have errors in them.

The setup is a freshly installed openSUSE 11.2 x86_64 VMware Player virtual machine, default settings for the install except for setting the language to UK English, keyboard to US english, Gnome desktop rather than KDE. As soon as it installed I logged in, scp'd the installer over and ran it.

Should be pretty easy to reproduce if you need to.

Thanks for looking at this.

Regards,
Nathan.

Hi,

Looks like a user authentication issue on your system.

i) Do you have a 'postgres' user on your system?

If yes, can you login into it as:

Also, you can try to install postgresql with a different service account by using --serviceaccount CLI parameter. Try that with your logged in user name and share the results with us.

Sachin_S wrote:Looks like a user authentication issue on your system.

i) Do you have a 'postgres' user on your system?

It does look that way, doesn't it? But there's no postgres user on openSuSE by default - I just did a fresh reinstall to get the default setup again to verify that, and:

Sachin_S wrote:Also, you can try to install postgresql with a different service account by using --serviceaccount CLI parameter. Try that with your logged in user name and share the results with us.

Are you sure that parameter exists to the installer? Using the --help parameter doesn't show it up, and when I specify it I get:

Thanks again for you help. I'm happy to keep helping to track this one down, so any more suggestions are welcome.

Regards,
Nathan.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 19 Jul 2010 08:53:52

Ok, I've retested this with openSUSE 11.3 and the problem still exists. I looked into this a bit further and noticed this (the command that the install shell script runs to create the postgres user, except the user is replaced with "test"):

So, it works on SLES 11 but fails on recent openSUSE distributions. Then I found https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=556077, which seems to be the bug. This confirms it:

The other workaround I've noticed works is setting a password for the user, which of course unlocks the account. Reading through the install script I think if I create the postgres user manually before running the installer, with home directory in the correct location, I worked out that I'd be able to install PostgresPlus. I've tested this now and can confirm it works.

The openSUSE bug I referenced above is marked fixed against 11.2, but I can reproduce it in 11.3. I'm going to reopen that openSUSE bug as well.

I've opened a new openSUSE bug to cover this issue - https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=623432

Nathan_Robertson wrote:I've opened a new openSUSE bug to cover this issue - https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=623432

Ok, that bug has been looked at by a Novell employee and marked INVALID, with the following comment:

The behavior is correct and the expected one by definition.
Please read the useradd manual page and fix your useradd command for postgres.
You need to create a system account if it should be without password and root
be able to su into it.

Could somebody from EnterpriseDB please look at this bug and fix the installer for at least in time for 9.0, and preferably for 8.4 as well? It is apparently a simple case of adding the "-r" flag to the useradd command, to create a system user, which will then allow the script to su in the desired way. I can't see this breaking on RHEL or any other supported distro as a result of this change.