libguestfs and hardened-gentoo

[Construx]

I have a PC running grsec/pax Hardened-Gentoo as the host operating system for hypervisor KVM/Qemu, and it all works quite nicely for the most part. I have both Linux and Windows guests. However, recently I ran into a problem trying to emerge (i.e., install) a program on the host called libguestfs, which is described here, http://libguestfs.org/. This program fails to build with error messages, which I now get to delve into to sort out because I would really like to use the libguestfs program if at all possible. I have not yet determined what is the root cause, but this is a very unusual problem because, as I stated, everything else pretty much works without much massaging due to the hardened components. I did an initial search for any issued relating to grsec/pac and this program, but I found nothing. That is a good sign, but I also wanted to make an inquiry here to see whether there are any known issues in connection with this program. Any ideas or pointers would be welcome if someone is aware of any such issues. Thanks.

[PaX Team]

you should probably report this in the gentoo bugzilla and CC the hardened folks and me on it.

[Construx]

Will do, thanks.

[Construx]

I found the problem, which had nothing whatsoever to do with grsec/Pax. It was purely my error in not noticing one of the messages indicating an installed dependency version was not high enough.

Apparently, I was better able to see the message indicating the problem after I posted the lines up to begin troubleshooting because the appearance of black text on white background made it more noticeable than looking at it in the terminal having white text on black background. Go figure!

Here was the problem. I had the wrong version of one program dependency, namely, "augeus". I was supposed to have version 1.0 or greater, but I actually had version 0.10. Close in appearance only, but not close enough!


checking for PCRE... yes
checking for AUGEAS... no
configure: error: Package requirements (augeas >= 1.0.0) were not met:

Requested 'augeas >= 1.0.0' but version of augeas is 0.10.0


Thanks for your replying promptly and interest. Take care.

[N8Fear]

Just as a hint for possible future issues: If you had posted the actual build error here, someone else may have spotted it and you may have gotten it up faster. Generally "some error" is far less likely to receive a helpfull answer than the detailed error message...