HEADS-UP: installworld on r299292 through r299317 will replace master.passwd, passwd, and group files

[Glen Barber]

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 08:18:44AM +0200, O. Hartmann wrote:
> On Tue, 10 May 2016 05:53:41 +0000
> Glen Barber <gjb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
> > Thanks to O. Hartmann promptly reporting this, it was discovered that
> > 'installworld' on revisions r299292-r299317 will silently replace
> > /etc/passwd, /etc/master.passwd, and /etc/group with the defaults.  It
> > is possible there are other files affected.  One file I can think of
> > off-hand is /etc/mail/aliases, but in my development system, did not
> > have local changes to this, so cannot 100% confirm.
> > 
> > Please avoid this range of revisions.
> > 
> > I am very sorry this went unnoticed before this change was committed.
> > 
> 
> Great!
> 
> It is not only master.passwd, it is also group and several other config files,
> I suspect it is the whole bunch of files located in /etc/ getting reset to
> their initial file values.
> 
> My OpenLDAP environment isn't working anymore due to /etc/pam.d reset. X11
> doesn't start anymore due to reset of /etc/ttys. also, sysctl.conf has been
> reset.
> 
> I haven't figured out so far how far this goes. Lucky for those having
> recent /etc/ backups. A pity FreeBSD doens't backup this by default.
> 

The change (incorrectly) invoked the 'distribution' target, so anything
that gets "touched" by that will likely be affected.

You are correct that we should have an additional failsafe for this kind
of thing, not just a subset of files arbitrarily placed in /var/backups
via a periodic(8) script.

Glen

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