Tails

#2 Updated by anonym 2015-09-23 06:42:41

emmapeel wrote:
> And another user reported seeing when in Failsafe:
>
> “/scripts/init-premount”
>
> as last message.

I have been able to reproduce this as follows: I installed Tails 1.5.1 to a USB drive, installed the 1.5.1_to_1.6 upgrade, then cropped all but the first 10 MB of the 1.6.iuk. Hence it really seems that…

> If you have installed Tails 1.2.2 and incrementally upgraded since then, the IUKs until now total at 1577 MB, which may be too much

… this is the problem, and that…

> The Upgrader should notice when there’s too little space, and give an appropriate error => abort, but it seems it installs a corrupted IUK, then it’s no surprise if it fails at /scripts/init-premount

… the Tails upgrader fails to detect when there’s too little space and instead installs a corrupted IUK in that case. After a quick look into tails-upgrade-frontend (well, Tails::IUK::Frontend) I can see that there is a check for this, but it must be broken some how. There is a test against this in the IUK test suite, but perhaps there’s some edge case, when only a few bytes are missing or something?

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2015-09-23 06:45:28

I’ll take a look ASAP, but ASAP may be tomorrow night or Friday, which may be too far in the future for quickly finding and documenting a workaround (assuming that by then, most people who will be affected by haven’t seen the bug yet will probably have been hit by it).

#4 Updated by emmapeel 2015-09-23 06:50:15

If I understand the problem correctly, a workaround may be to ‘Upgrade from ISO’ to Tails 1.6 from another Tails.

Please confirm…

#5 Updated by anonym 2015-09-23 07:10:32

anonym wrote:
> perhaps there’s some edge case, when only a few bytes are missing or something?

This seems quite unlikely; the warning should be shown if less than three times than the required space is available, so there’s quite a bit of margin that should eliminate those types of errors.

#6 Updated by anonym 2015-09-23 07:15:29

emmapeel wrote:
> If I understand the problem correctly, a workaround may be to ‘Upgrade from ISO’ to Tails 1.6 from another Tails.
>
> Please confirm…

Yes, it work (and any persistent partition will be rescued). A “Clone & Upgrade” from a Tails 1.6 would work. A “Clone & Upgrade” (so kind of a downgrade) from Tails 1.5.1 or earlier and then the incremental upgrade to 1.6 should also work.

#8 Updated by intrigeri 2015-09-23 08:03:04

There are similar reports on https://www.reddit.com/r/tails/, that might help confirm where the problem comes from.

#13 Updated by intrigeri 2015-09-25 03:05:21

Do we have any hard data that indicates that the problem comes from trying to install an IUK while there’s not enough disk space, and that “the test about remaining space is failing”? The only info I see here is that if that guess was correct, then we would see the same symptoms. Let’s keep this ticket in its current state for now, and in the meantime I’ve asked for more info on Bug #10239.

#14 Updated by emmapeel 2015-09-27 01:50:45

moved this comment to the other thread