[solved] Portage syncing on its own? How to disable?

Message

poolshrk · Post by **poolshrk** » Sat Dec 16, 2017 2:05 am

Hi, I have multiple computers so instead of syncing portage on each one I manually mount /usr/portage as an nfs/sshfs file system.

Recently however I have noticed that all of my computers seem to be automatically syncing portage on their own. This is very annoying. Why/how is this happening and how can I stop it?

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Sat Dec 16, 2017 2:15 am

Were these fresh installs or did you inherit these computers? My machines do not automatically sync.

Check your crontabs and ensure you or previous owner hadn't automated it.

poolshrk · Post by **poolshrk** » Sat Dec 16, 2017 2:22 am

Thanks for the suggestion.

I briefly checked out the crontabs and didn't see anything. It's possible I accidentally synced the wrong computer (multiple times) but it seems to be happening so often and on multiple different computers that it seems unlikely.

I'll look into it more in depth when I get some free time, but though I would ask here first just in case it could save me some time. Thanks again.

szatox · Post by **szatox** » Sat Dec 16, 2017 1:22 pm

ps auxwf will print all processes stacked as a tree for your convenience.
You can find the trigger there, unless it's fire, fork and forget sort of trigger that exists immediately, making PID 1 the parent of its orphaned subprocess.

Perhaps running it from cron (or even in a loop in a terminal) would help you nail it.
Also, grep produces different exit codes when it finds a string you're looking for than when it fails, so you have an easy way to find whether or not a particular dump from ps contains the process you're looking for (hint: grep -B7 -A2 -E '[s]ync' )

limn · Post by **limn** » Sat Dec 16, 2017 1:33 pm

Do you see

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1513427085:  *** emerge  --sync

in the /var/log/emerge.log on all of the boxes?

Jaglover · Post by **Jaglover** » Sat Dec 16, 2017 2:56 pm

There can be more than one crontab and there is system crontab. Have you looked at all of them?

poolshrk · Post by **poolshrk** » Sat Dec 16, 2017 6:45 pm

Hmmm...

I may have found it. The other day I installed lynis (security auditing tool) just to check it out, and I just noticed it automatically installed a crontab in cron.daily:

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#!/bin/sh

/usr/sbin/lynis --checkall --auditor "automated" --cronjob

in the lynis log file I found this:

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2017-12-16 11:10:13 Performing test ID PKGS-7393 (Check for Gentoo vulnerable packages)
2017-12-16 11:10:13 Action: updating portage with emerge-webrsync
2017-12-16 11:10:38 Result: emerge-webrsync finished
2017-12-16 11:10:38 Test: checking if /usr/bin/glsa-check exists
2017-12-16 11:10:38 Result: found /usr/bin/glsa-check
2017-12-16 11:10:38 Test: checking if there are any vulnerable packages

So that appears to be the issue?

Thanks everyone.

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Sat Dec 16, 2017 7:06 pm

Sounds right. I guess all these things are elective after all; I'm not a lynis user.

poolshrk · Post by **poolshrk** » Sun Dec 17, 2017 12:06 am

For others who may run across this issue, it looks like you can disable it by creating the file

/etc/lynis/custom.prf

with the following configuration option

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refresh-repositories=no

Ant P. · Post by **Ant P.** » Sun Dec 17, 2017 8:48 pm

FWIW the correct way to check only for GLSAs (which I'm guessing this software is supposed to do but messed up) is "emaint sync --sync-submodule glsa".