Dist-Upgrade Karmic->Lucid: Upgrading slapd fails with "chown: invalid argument: `'"

The slapd.postinst script attempts to ensure that various files and directories have the proper ownerships (and permissions) set. It looks like it may be having trouble extracting the correct list of directories in your case.

Can you post the output of the following command (run as root)?

  grep -E "^(include|database|suffix|directory)" /etc/ldap/slapd.conf

Hopefully that will give some hint as to what is causing the confusion.

setting status incomplete, waiting for user feedback

Here the requested output:

root@srv-tresa:/# grep -E "^(include|database|suffix|directory)" /etc/ldap/slapd.conf
include /etc/ldap/srv-nolla/common/schemas.include
include /etc/ldap/srv-tresa/overlays.d/consumer_chaining-writes.include
database hdb
include /etc/ldap/srv-nolla/common/suffix.include
include /etc/ldap/srv-tresa/passwd.d/rootpw.passwd
directory "/var/lib/ldap"
include /etc/ldap/srv-nolla/common/indexes.include
include /etc/ldap/srv-nolla/common/acl.include
include /etc/ldap/srv-tresa/overlays.d/consumer_replsync.include

slapd.conf depends heavily on chained include files, which are checked out from a subversion repository. All files are owned by openldap:openldap, as well as the /var/lib/ldap sleepycat DB.

Yes, I think that explains why you are getting the "chown: invalid argument `'" error....

Specifically, when the slapd.postinst parses through the slapd.conf file, it attempts to process "include"d files... but it assumes that the "database", "suffix", and "directory" lines for a particular database are all found in the same file.

So in your case, it looks through all the files and find a "suffix" line (i.e. presumably one found in "suffix.include"), but then when it goes to look up what directory that suffix was tied to, it isn't able to associate that suffix with the "directory" line found there in your "slapd.conf" file. (This in turn means that it ends up calling chown with an empty FILE argument, e.g.
  chown openldap ""
, which then generates the error message you see).

In the short run, since your database files do already have the correct permissions, you can probably work around this dpkg error by commenting out the "update_databases_permissions" line in slapd.postinst (its line 670 in the script for slapd 2.4.21-0ubuntu5), and then running "dpkg --configure" again.

Obviously you will be likely to have the same problem again the next time slapd is upgraded... but I don't know if there will be any easy fix for that, given the general move away from slapd.conf-style configuration....

I had the same problem upgrading slapd on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Using a workaround (commenting out SLAPD_CONF in /etc/default/slapd and running `aptitude -f install`) I was able to make dpkg happy.

Generally it's IMHO a bad idea to do too much magic in the postinst script of the slapd package - at least if it breaks so easily.

> Obviously you will be likely to have the same problem again
> the next time slapd is upgraded... but I don't know if there
> will be any easy fix for that, given the general move away
> from slapd.conf-style configuration....

Unfortunately the new dynamic configuration (cn=config) is no viable alternative at the moment, as not all modules configuration is available through it (e. g. it's not possible to configure a meta backend using the new configuration style).

This bug is related to to LP: #632051. The two are triggered by a different specific issue within the slapd.conf file, and would need different changes to the postinst script in order to allow it to actually parse the config file correctly... but I think the patch I proposed in that bug would allow the package upgrade to complete, with a warning message, in both situations (rather than aborting and leaving the package in an unconfigured state, as currently happens in both situations).

> Unfortunately the new dynamic configuration (cn=config) is no viable alternative at the moment, as not all modules
> configuration is available through it (e. g. it's not possible to configure a meta backend using the new configuration
> style).

But AFAICT the slapd package on Ubuntu comes with no slapd.conf, just a cn=config. So why is the postinst script still looking for one?