While building out a couple new servers FreeBSD 6.2 was released. Since these boxes were not quite ready to be put into production we took the opportunity to upgrade these boxes from 6.1 to 6.2 following the instructions from the UPDATING file in src as usual. Initially everything seemed fine, but then we noticed that our previously working amanda backups started to fail. We install amanda from source and run it from xinetd, which we install from ports.

Initially I figured amanda just needed to be recompiled, but the new install was failing as well. Specifically amcheck from the amanda server was reporting that the client self check was timing out. (A common and usually easily fixed issue.) During the troubleshooting I noticed that xinetd was reporting the following errors in /var/log/messages.

Jan 24 14:36:34 hostname xinetd[44463]: fcntl( 0, clear close-on-exec ) failed: 
Bad file descriptor (errno = 9)
Jan 24 14:36:34 hostname xinetd[44463]: dup2( 0, 0 ) failed: Bad file 
descriptor (errno = 9)

After these errors finished the amanda server would report the selfcheck request timed out and suggest the host was down. Normally when this runs the amanda client creates a /var/tmp/amanda directory on the server being backed up, but after the selfcheck fails the directory has not been created. This seems to imply that amanda is never actually starting.

This lead me to believe that there was something wrong with xinetd and not amanda so I disabled amanda from the xinetd config and added it to plain old inetd and fired it up. With amanda running from inetd the selfcheck would complete properly and the /var/tmp/amanda would be created with the proper files.

The strange thing I have two other services running from xinetd that /are/ working just fine, so xinetd itself seems to be at least partially ok.

After re-installing xinetd about a dozen times with variations in the config options and from both ports and source I'm still getting the same errors and it's really eating my lunch.

I am able to confirm that the amanda and xinetd configs were working under 6.1 because we have backups of these machines. Also, this combination of services are running just fine on other servers. Just to be sure though I reinstalled amanda and xinetd on one of my 6.1 boxes from the same source that I'm having trouble with on 6.2 and everything works fine on 6.1.

It seems very odd, but there does seem to be some strange subtle issue or bug with FreeBSD 6.2 as it relates to the combination of amanda and xinetd.

Has anyone else seen anything even remotely similar with FreeBSD 6.2?

Of course I could just run amanda from inetd, but that loses some security I would much rather retain. I'm considering attempting to roll back to 6.1, but I'm afraid that will cause all sort of strange and unexpected results. Plus, I'll want to move to 6.2 at some point and might just need to solve this issue then.

Thanks in advance for your time and I apologize if something similar has already been discussed and I somehow missed it in my troubleshooting and research.

Matt Ruzicka - Senior Systems Administrator
FRII
970-212-0728  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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