Slackware package updater/upgrader

[gmoreno]

I tried SlackUp a while back and it didnt upgrade my slack packages but instead erased my hard drive. Now I'm afraid to try it or AutoSlack. Did you guys experience any problems like this with SlackUp? ANd How is the new version of SlackUp or AutoSlack working for you.

[treatment]

That's bizarre. Did let XConsole know about the SlackUP erasing your hard-drive?

Fwiw, I checked the SlackUP source-code and didn't find anything there that will erase your whole hard-drive ala fdisk or something.

I've not tried AutoSlack, yet, as I'm in the middle of hardware-upgrades.

[MikeV]

I'd let X_Console know if something catastrophic like that happened. IMO, if something like that happened, and it truly is the fault of the program (doubtful, though), I'd see it as a disservice to the programmer to NOT tell him/her about such a problem.

-M

[X_console]

Hmm... from where did you download slackUp? If you downloaded it directly from my site it should be okay. If not, then it could have been trojaned. There is nothing in the code that would have deleted your hard drive. In fact, all it does is download all upgraded packages to a temporary directory. If you provide the option to automatically install every package, then it'll do a "upgradepkg" on each downloaded package. Which is exactly what you would have to do if you didn't issue the auto install option.

What options did you run it with? And did you make any modifications on it? Here are the md5sums of the slackUp.tgz Slack package and the slackUp-1.0.tar.gz package:

563400a5c6bc5a7966e3e39d3806aca7 slackUp.tgz

e47076508bb4fdcefbd9ce4d32c4a694 slackUp-1.0.tar.gz

The one you have should match with the md5sums I've provided. If not, then they could have been tampered with.

[andy4us1]

I use autoslack all the time. It works well, and the addition to 1.6 of the ability to skip directories is good is good, but won't be really good until you can turn off individual files from updating. The problem is if you choose automatic update, it can do things like overwrite your xfree 4.0.2 with xfree 3.3.6 i they've changed anything in their copy of xfree. Same with the etc package, that one wiped out some of my config files. So yes it works , but I would choose the - download option, then ls to see new files, and do the updatepkg manually. Having said that, I still run it under a 'cron' job every night ! And I had to reinstall Xfree again a couple of nights ago !

Andy

[gmoreno]

It was the first version of Slackup
I did not modify it and it was on a clean install. It did it twice. The first time it did it I thought that someone had hacked me and erase my hd but then the second time I realized it was Slackup. I believe I got it of your site from a link to it from LNO. Not sure what happened. I tried e-mailing you but I might have e-mailed you at the bogus e-mail you have on your site. Not sure

[treatment]

gmoreno,

I'm not blaming you or anything. It's just so bizarre and weird that your hard-drive got erased by SlackUP.

I personally checked the first version of SlackUP when XConsole first released it. Like I said before, there was nothing there that could've erased your hard-drive.

The only command I know that will erase stuff from your hard-drive is an absolute call to rm -rf and that command was not there when I checked it back then.

Maybe something else happened with your system. A sleeper or a trojan is a high possibility.

Is your system a dual-boot?

[gmoreno]

Yeah it's a dual boot. I would setup things how I wanted in Slack...dSL...and other things then let slackup run after while things would stop working and when rebooted all my partitions were wiped. Even my win partition....it was in /mnt/win maybe something did a rm -rf / who knows.

[andy4us1]

Sounds to me more like your partition table or MBR got hosed. Also, if your running LILO and the etc.tgz or lilo.tgz gets updated and lilo isn't run again to change the MBR, then LILO is screwed and boot fails. I ended up writing a simple script to make sure that LILO is always run after I use autoslack for that very reason. Autoslack 1.6 does that automatically now though.

Andy

[X_console]

Ah, ok, now it's beginning to make a little sense. If you were using the first version of slackUp, and lilo.tgz was installed, then your MBR wasn't updated. slackUp 0.1 didn't automatically rerun "lilo". I realized that and fixed it before releasing slackUp 1.0. If the MBR was the case, then that means your partitions weren't deleted. Just that "lilo" had to be rerun from a bootdisk.

[gmoreno]

I'm not sure Exactly what happened to me this was during the summer. The thing is that either I lost my info or I thought I lost everything. Now I'm affraid/paranoid about running slackup or an updater.

If when I run it what do I need to prevent this from happening again. BTW I'm going to back up my mp3s and my docs onto another partion which is not on /etc/fstab

[gmoreno]

I just remembered that it wasnt a lilo problem but that it actually recursivly erase my hard drive. I even tried to boot in to windows with a floppy and my win partion was completely wiped.