[wplug] neatx server install failure

Ted Rodgers ted.d.rodgers at gmail.com
Mon May 17 16:31:57 EDT 2010


I've not used neatx, but here is some input from what I see:

The double slash <//> is legal in *nix paths and won't cause a problem
with anything I've seen with the odd exception that if some variable
were to have a stray / in it and it was later being interpreted as an
absolute path (starting from /) rather than a realtive path from
inside whatever directory your script/process was running in.

>>Setting up neatx-server (0.3.1+svn59-0~ppa1~lucid1) ...
>>chown: cannot dereference `/var/lib/nxserver/home//.ssh/authorized_keys2':
>>No such file or directory
>>chown: cannot dereference `/var/lib/nxserver/home//.ssh/client.id_dsa.key':
>>No such file or directory
>>chmod: cannot operate on dangling symlink


Dangling symlink makes me think you should take a look inside
/var/lib/nxserver/home//.ssh, so cd into there and use either ls -l
or "readlink" on any files you see.  Red blinking names indicate
broken links, which is what I'm guessing is going on.  (btw, using \ls
-l  wil remove the horrible red flashing by skipping around the color
option that  ls actually includes in default aliases.)  It would be
odd if keys generated in there were actually sym links elsewhere,
though, since it is obviously creating a user account with
/var/lib/nxserver as the home directory.  (odd place for a user to
live, but legal as long as properly defined in the /etc/passwd file)


The .ssh directory being owned by root is ok during installation as
long as somewhere later in the script a chown to the correct
user:group with the right modes is done; ssh keys won't work if they
the .ssh directory is even group readable (possibly even they are
group transverseable .. that is +x  ... I always see .ssh set
rwx------ aka 700 permissions).

This may not be broken , but it is also using a file named
<blah>/.ssh/authorized_keys2.  As far as I know, the file should just
be <blah>/.ssh/authorized_keys  unless your sshd_config has this
defined:
AuthorizedKeysFile       .ssh/authorized_keys2

Most distros dropped the 2 from the file name once people finally
acknowledged that ssh1 was something they _should_ and sometimes
legally _must_ stop using.




In the end, you're using a distro that is simply unpacking a binary,
so the binary may simply be a bad version of a package.  Is there a
version newer/older you could try?  It may be easier than fixing the
dpkg, rehashing it so it's md5sums are ok and installing from there.
If you do try another release version, I'd suggest wiping tht
/var/lib/nxserver and taking out any entries in /etc/passwd,
/etc/group, and /etc/shadow as well as any other configs you can find
that it had put on your system.


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