On Sun, Jun 02, 2019 at 11:38:36AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > Hi Florian, > > "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <pelzflor...@pelzflorian.de> skribis: > > > On Sat, Jun 01, 2019 at 11:37:51PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > >> This is definitely not a problem when booting. It could be a problem if > >> you’re concurrently running ‘guix system reconfigure’ (which runs > >> activation snippets, including the account updating code) and some other > >> program, such as ‘passwd’, that assumes it holds an exclusive lock on > >> the file. Though in that case, the worst that could happen is that the > >> changes made by Guix would be undoed by that other program. > > Actually, another thing that could happen is that Guix reads an > incomplete /etc/shadow because some other program is writing to it. > > In that case, suppose Guix reads a partial /etc/shadow where user > “florian” is missing. It would then create a new /etc/shadow where the > password for “florian” is uninitialized (or set to the initial value > that appears in config.scm.) > > Could it be what happened to you? You’d have to be running ‘passwd’ or > ‘usermod’ or whatever at exactly the same time as ‘guix system > reconfigure’ (and you’d have to be “lucky”). >
No, I did not change my password in a very long time. Is there no proper cross-application locking mechanism for /etc/passwd? elogind uses struct flock flock = { .l_type = F_WRLCK, .l_whence = SEEK_SET, .l_start = 0, .l_len = 0, }; […] fd = open(path, O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_CLOEXEC|O_NOCTTY|O_NOFOLLOW, 0600); […] r = fcntl(fd, F_SETLKW, &flock; Should Guix adopt something similar for shadow/passwd/… database reads? > > error: > > '/gnu/store/h5bi85lgnpqcjx2avy126lwiss01idsj-grub-efi-2.02/sbin/grub-install > > --boot-directory //boot --bootloader-id=Guix --efi-directory //boot/efi' > > exited with status 1; output follows: > > > > Installing for x86_64-efi platform. > > Could not prepare Boot variable: No such file or directory > > > > /gnu/store/h5bi85lgnpqcjx2avy126lwiss01idsj-grub-efi-2.02/sbin/grub-install: > > error: efibootmgr failed to register the boot entry: Input/output error. > > Maybe you’ve exhausted the room for those EFI “variables” or something? > > Thanks for your debugging work! > > Ludo’. Maybe exhausted, maybe it is an error with the NVRAM. I will try making grub-install execute like when installing on external USB drives so it writes nothing to the motherboard. Regards, Florian