dpkg-divert: cannot open diversions: No such file or directory

[Torsten Schlabach]

Hi Thomas,

 > Use strace to find the syscall which fails.

This led to the problem; thank you for the hint. Once you see it it's so 
obvious. It fails upon unpacking the devices.tar.gz because by default 
one is not allowed to create device nodes (mknod) inside a guest; which 
makes sense.

It would be nice if debootstrap would provide an error message and not 
just silently die. I might take the time to file an enhancement with the 
developers. Right now, it seems to die or skip some steps, then the 
make-fai-nfsroot script just continues and runs into that dpkg-divert 
problem, which is entirely unrelated; it's just the result of the 
half-way done and unnoticed debootstrap.

As long as one owns the vserver host (and not just the guest) the 
original problem can be solved by putting MKNOD into the 
/etc/vservers/<servername>/bcapabilities file. (Sorry to anyone who just 
rented a vserver as many people do these days.) That will make 
make-fai-nfsroot succeed.

Note: It might be necessary to allow the fai vserver guest some more 
freedom besides MKNOD in order to be able to really use it as a FAI 
install server. I personally only needed to have the (amd64) nfsroot 
created to port it onto an existing (i386) install server, so I did not 
care about the rest. The CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability is usually needed to 
allow the guest to do any mounting, which is also part of some of the 
scripts involved in FAI.

Thank you for your help on this.

Regards,
Torsten