[Thinlinc-technical] ThinLinc 4.5 Upgrade Issues

[Pierre Ossman]

On Wed, 25 Nov 2015 16:16:45 +0100
Rafael Ostertag <rafael.ostertag at math.uzh.ch> wrote:

> 
> After updating all VSM Agents to version 4.5.0, creating new user 
> session went back to normal.
> 
> We double checked the Release Notes as well as the ThinLinc 
> Administrator Guide and couldn't find a hint on what the sequence of 
> updating should be, i.e. Server first vs. Client first.
> 
> Thus the question, is this behavior known and is there an
> recommendation where to start an upgrade (on the VSM Server or VSM
> Agent)?
> 

I'm afraid you cannot reliably mix different versions of the master and
the agents. We try to avoid changing the protocol between them, but
sometimes it is unfortunately necessary.

So to be safe, you need to have a service window during upgrades where
you can switch over.

> Lastly, our user's home directories are NFS mounted using automount
> and are created outside of ThinLinc. Still, we had `make_homedir=1`
> set in our `/opt/thinlinc/etc/conf.d/vsmagent.hconf` for some
> historic reason. After upgrading the VSM Agents to 4.5.0, some Agents
> tried to create home directories for new user session which failed
> with `[Errno 13] Permission denied` and the log in failed again. That
> didn't happended under 4.4.0.
> 
> We don't rely on that feature, and also didn't pay much attention to
> it. Hence, we rectified the problem by setting `make_homedir=0`.
> 
> But we're wondering why VSM Agent 4.5.0 was unable to figure out,
> that the user home directories are already in place. Version 4.4.0
> didn't suffer from this issue. Did anybody else experience this
> behavior?
> 

Checking for the home directory was unreliable so the model was changed
to attempt to create it, and continue if we were told that there was
already a directory there. There are some more details on the bugzilla
entry about this:

https://www.cendio.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4621

Rgds
-- 
Pierre Ossman           Software Development
Cendio AB		https://cendio.com
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Phone: +46-13-214600	https://plus.google.com/+CendioThinLinc

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
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