Ubuntu Fun
Last night, I ran into an issue with my Ubuntu server that holds all my media files and also serves as some-what as a backup server for my laptop.. My first warning sign that something was wonky was when I noticed Samba started filling up my mailbox with segfault warnings, soon after I discovered sudo and logins were segfaulting as well. Naturally, I was frustrated and being that it was 3 or so in the morning, I decided to deal with it once I woke back up..
Freshly rested, I had actually forgotten all about it not working until I wanted to watch an episode of “How I Met Your Mother” that was stored on there over lunch; My enjoyable lunch got twisted into something not quite as much.
With some googling and reading the log files, I learned that the issue lied with the pam_smbpass.so in /lib/security.. I subsequently disabled samba password synchronization with pam-auth-update and volia, sudo worked. However, samba was still borked, so this couldn’t be a permanent fix, although I had found the offending file.
With this information and more googling, I ran across this bug on Launchpad.net, describing pretty much the same situation I was in. I ran the suggested steps in the bug report, which consisted of purging samba and libpam-smbpass and manually making sure everything was removed from the /var/lib/samba directory.
Once I did that, I reinstalled samba and libpam-smbpass and everything seemed to work swimmingly, or so I thought. Later that night, I noticed once again that sudo was segfaulting, although the samba shares were working for the time being. I did some more work on the google ran across this bug report for Debian.. This message seemed to point exactly at the problem, CUPS (which makes sense, as I had recently setup a printer on the machine). After implementing the fix purposed in that message, everything seems to be working great.
I’m hoping that this bug gets ironed out, as its definitely not something a majority of users would know how/be willing to fix. There’s a few bug reports on Launchpad regarding this or something directly involving the packages listed above, some even marked as fixed, although from my experiences it doesn’t seem to be.
Last but not least, I wish a Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays) and a wonderful New Year to everyone who may happen to read this.
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Tagged as Linux, Sysadmin, Technology, Ubuntu + Categorized as Technology, Ubuntu