Mixed bag of things I'm just jotting down for now... I'd prefer if people could refrain from updating this page - get your own mixed bag! ;-)

Restore Problems

ext2fs_check_if_mount: No such file or directory while determining whether <device> is mounted.

This error is issued by mkfs. The reason is that no mtab support is present in busybox and busybox's mount is used.

busybox 1.1.3 (and possbily other version) may be broken on amd64 in that they seem to require the existence of /etc/mtab regardless of whether the corresponding configuration option is set or not. This is not an issue on i386.

mondorestore killed

If mondorestore gets killed during restore for no apparent reason, this may be a memory problem. If there is still swap space available, the underlying issue maybe the kernel OOM killer.

On Debian Sid amd64, kernel linux-image-2.6.16-2-amd64-k8, version 2.6.16-14 has this problem, whereas kernel linux-image-2.6.16-2-amd64-generic, version 2.6.16-14 is fine.

Compilation Problems

Compiler Warnings

gcc 4.1.2 appears to be stricter than earlier versions when '-Wall' is used. The following is fine in earlier versions of gcc:

*pos++;

but gives the following warning with gcc 4.1.2 (and '-Wall'):

warning: value computed is not used

This is rubbish, as e.g. it is perfectly valid to change a string pointer without ever directly using it because we might only be interested in the string from a certain position. A workaround to avoid the warning is to use:

pos += 1;

(No '*' at the front!)

busybox Error './sh: Cannot set tty process group (Operation not permitted)'

On Debian sid amd64, busybox versions 1.00, 1.1.3 and possibly others may give the following error when called as sh:

./sh: Cannot set tty process group (Operation not permitted)

Given that there is no prompt, this is a rather severe problem. Removing NFS mount supprot from busybox addresses the problem. Also, compilation against glibc 2.4 makes this go away. More info about the glibc side of things can be found here: ​http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=367656

This problem does not occur on i386.