bdes (and other) problems on 5.3 fixit cd

Matthias Buelow mkb at mkbuelow.net
Thu Mar 24 14:44:37 PST 2005


Matthias Buelow <mkb at incubus.de> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I'm trying the restore a dump, which I have encrypted with the bdes(1)
> utility, from a mounted 5.3-RELEASE fixit CD (cd2 i386).
>
> I have encrypted the dump with the same bdes that is on that CD.
> I use a pipeline that looks something like
>
>   /mnt2/usr/bin/bdes -d <dumpfile |/mnt2/sbin/restore -tf -
>
> (to view the dump) and after a couple kilobytes that seem to get
> through, I always get a stream of
>
>   : fwrite error at 8
>
> messages from bdes and decryption fails.
> Decryption works without problems on another machine on an ordinary
> 5.3-STABLE installation.  From looking at bdes.c, the message gets
> written on short writes (fwrite wrote less than requested).
> Instead of trying to write the rest, the author decided to just print
> a warning and that was it.
>
> Amazingly, the message doesn't get printed in a "bdes|cat" pipeline.
> Only when restore is being used does it seem to happen.
> Is there anything odd with shell pipelines on the fixit disk?
> It doesn't matter if I use sh or tcsh for running the pipeline.
>
> On a side note, there seem to be other problems with the 5.3 fixit
> disk.. one has to symlink /mnt2/usr/bin to /usr/bin because otherwise
> scp won't find the ssh executable, and "mount" complains about "nfs not
> compiled in" but there's a mount_nfs utility which works ok.  Editing a
> disklabel with "bsdlabel -e device" won't work, since bsdlabel complains
> about "/mnt2/stand/vi: No such file or directory" and one has to set
> EDITOR to "vi", or an existing pathname, in order to get it to work.
> All in all, makes a bit of an unpolished appearance.. hasn't the stuff
> been tested in a while?
>
> mkb.



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