Removal of incron requirement

News & Updates
#1

One of the systems used by Sympl is incron, which checks for disk changes and runs specific scripts when they happen. This is fine in many situations, but for systems running on NFS shares and a few other filesystems incrond doesn’t do anything, and you end up with a lot of processes instead.

With this in mind, I’ve removed the requirement for incrond - it was effectively only used to update the firewall whitelist/blacklist configurations, and that’s been replaced with updates to those scripts to cause relevant reloads when needed.

This is currently in the testing branch, and assuming no problems, I’ll be pushing it through to stable later this week.

1 Like
#2

Thanks for removing incrond. On buster-testing I’ve got the latest updates, and the incrond processes are still appearing, both on the Mythic Beasts VPS and the Mythic Beasts RPi.

These files related to incrond still appear to exist:

  • /etc/incron.d/sympl-firewall
  • /etc/incron.allow
  • /etc/incron.deny
  • /etc/incron.conf

Does anything else need to be done to remove these.

#3

I need to double check that the old config files get removed, along with the incrond package marked as not being needed any more.

If you remove the sympl-firewall file, and reload the service (and/or remove it) so you still see the processes appearing?

1 Like
#4

Where would the sympl-firewall file be located?

It looks as though incrond is still required by sympl-firewall:

$ sudo apt remove incron
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
  libruby
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  incron sympl-firewall
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 973 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.
#5

This should have hit both Stretch versions now, and will be appearing in Buster-testing shortly and then stable later today - a minor typo in the version number meant it wasn’t getting upgraded.

1 Like
#6

With an update, upgrade and auto remove, incrond is now gone.

sympl@vps3:/etc/sympl/firewall$ sudo apt update
[sudo] password for sympl:
Get:1 http://security.debian.org buster/updates InRelease [39.1 kB]
Get:2 http://packages.mythic-beasts.com/mythic buster-testing InRelease [19.0 kB]
Hit:3 https://mirror.mythic-beasts.com/debian buster InRelease
Get:4 https://mirror.mythic-beasts.com/debian buster-updates InRelease [49.3 kB]
Get:5 https://mirror.mythic-beasts.com/debian buster-backports InRelease [46.7 kB]
Get:6 http://packages.mythic-beasts.com/mythic buster-testing/main amd64 Packages [6,028 B]
Get:7 https://mirror.mythic-beasts.com/debian buster-backports/main amd64 Packages.diff/Index [27.8 kB]
Get:8 https://mirror.mythic-beasts.com/debian buster-backports/main amd64 Packages 2019-09-17-1412.34.pdiff [198 B]
Get:8 https://mirror.mythic-beasts.com/debian buster-backports/main amd64 Packages 2019-09-17-1412.34.pdiff [198 B]
Fetched 188 kB in 3s (55.3 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
1 package can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see it.
sympl@vps3:/etc/sympl/firewall$ sudo apt dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
  incron
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it.
The following packages will be upgraded:
  sympl-firewall
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 57.8 kB of archives.
After this operation, 5,120 B disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://packages.mythic-beasts.com/mythic buster-testing/main amd64 sympl-firewall amd64 10.0.190918.0 [57.8 kB]
Fetched 57.8 kB in 0s (2,335 kB/s)
Reading changelogs... Done
(Reading database ... 58298 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../sympl-firewall_10.0.190918.0_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking sympl-firewall (10.0.190918.0) over (10.0.190816.0) ...
Setting up sympl-firewall (10.0.190918.0) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.5-2) ...
sympl@vps3:/etc/sympl/firewall$ sudo apt autoremove
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  incron
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 297 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
(Reading database ... 58296 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing incron (0.5.12-1) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.5-2) ...

Thanks for fixing.