[pkg-ntp-maintainers] Bug#479719: ntpdate: leaves lock file hanging around

[Norbert Preining]

Package: ntpdate
Version: 1:4.2.4p4+dfsg-4
Severity: serious
Justification: breaks boot process

Dear all,

ntpdate hangs the boot process in certain cases: it starts
/etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate with set -e, but the calls to
ntpdate-debian exit with an error message, so the script terminates
immediately, and thus the lockfile is not removed, from the code:

set -e 
...
/usr/sbin/ntpdate-debian -s $OPTS 2>/dev/null

if [ -x /usr/bin/lockfile-create ] ; then
	kill $LOCKTOUCHPID
	lockfile-remove $LOCKFILE
fi

Now since ntpdate-debian return 1, the process is terminated immediately
and the kill/lockfile-remove is never executed.

But, later on, the ntp server tries to start and checks for the same
lockfile and hangs there (ok, after 5min it will continue because
lockfile utils consider an 5m untouched file stale, but that is not an
option for booting).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-wl (SMP w/2 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-15, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-15 (charmap=ISO-8859-15)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages ntpdate depends on:
ii  libc6                         2.7-10     GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libcap1                       1:1.10-14  support for getting/setting POSIX.
ii  libssl0.9.8                   0.9.8g-8   SSL shared libraries
ii  netbase                       4.32       Basic TCP/IP networking system

Versions of packages ntpdate recommends:
ii  lockfile-progs                0.1.11-0.1 Programs for locking and unlocking

-- no debconf information