Bug report: WG won't reinstall after some OS recover procedures

Bug report: WG won't reinstall after some OS recover procedures

[Nicholas Joll]

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To Whom It May Concern

What happened. (1) On a system on which Wireguard was working, I used
the 'TimeShift' program to restore Linux Mint from backup - twice, on
one occasion including within the restore a reinstall of Grub and
rebuild of initramfs. (Points 2-3 that follow apply to both versions of
the restore.) (2) After the restore, WG still worked. (3) I updated the
kernel (on one occasion before rebooting, or another after rebooting).
(4) WG no longer worked. When I tried to reinstall it, it gave
'post-install' messages about how the dkms module was installed already.
All manner of package removal and purging and file deletion failed to
achieve anything - until I discovered that deleting a file in
/var/lib/dkms/wireguard/ (together with 'sudo dkms --reconfigure -a'?)
fixed things.

What should have happened. WG should be able to cope with such a
restore. At worst, it should give the user messages about how to fix the
problem.

System Concerned: Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon; WG 0.0.20171211.

Nicholas


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Re: Bug report: WG won't reinstall after some OS recover procedures

[Jonathon Fernyhough]

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On 18/12/17 14:29, Nicholas Joll wrote:
> To Whom It May Concern
> 
> What happened. (1) On a system on which Wireguard was working, I used
> the 'TimeShift' program to restore Linux Mint from backup - twice, on
> one occasion including within the restore a reinstall of Grub and
> rebuild of initramfs. (Points 2-3 that follow apply to both versions of
> the restore.) (2) After the restore, WG still worked. (3) I updated the
> kernel (on one occasion before rebooting, or another after rebooting).
> (4) WG no longer worked. When I tried to reinstall it, it gave
> 'post-install' messages about how the dkms module was installed already.
> All manner of package removal and purging and file deletion failed to
> achieve anything - until I discovered that deleting a file in
> /var/lib/dkms/wireguard/ (together with 'sudo dkms --reconfigure -a'?)
> fixed things.
> 
> What should have happened. WG should be able to cope with such a
> restore. At worst, it should give the user messages about how to fix the
> problem.
> 
> System Concerned: Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon; WG 0.0.20171211.
> 

This sounds like an issue centred on DKMS rather than WireGuard itself.

Do you have any other DKMS-managed kernel modules? If so, how did they
cope with the restore process?

Which WireGuard packages are you using?


J


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Re: Bug report: WG won't reinstall after some OS recover procedures

[Jason A. Donenfeld]

Hello Nicholas,

This sounds like it's a bug in your distributions usage of DKMS.
Alternatively, it could be user error: have you added the dkms service
to bootup so that it checks to see if it needs to rebuild modules?

Regards,
Jason