RHBA-2009:0110 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

Updated parted packages that resolve several issues are now available.

Description

The GNU Parted program allows you to create, destroy, resize, move, and
copy hard disk partitions. Parted can be used for creating space for new
operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, and copying data to new hard disks.

These updated parted packages provide fixes for the following bugs:

• in certain situations, parted asked questions and attempted to interact

with the user even when the '-s' option ("never prompt the user") was
supplied on the command line. (This option is especially useful for scripts
which call parted.) In these updated packages, parted will not prompt or
interact with the user when the '-s' option is supplied, thus resolving
this issue.

• parted would return an exit code of 0, indicating success, even when the

command returned an error message. In these updated packages, the exit
codes of the parted utility now correspond more exactly to the success or
failure of the command which was run, thus resolving the issue.

• options supplied to parted on the command line which included unit

parameters indicating offsets from the end of the disk (e.g. '-1s') were
parsed by the getopt option parser as incorrectly-specified options. The
correct way to specify offsets to parted such that getopt does not attempt
to parse them as options is to supply the offset, but preceded by an
"empty" special argument: ' -- '. For example:

parted -s /dev/sdb -- mklabel gpt mkpart primary ext2 1s -1s

The "KNOWN ISSUES" section of the parted(8) man page has been updated to
include an example of specifying offsets in this way so that getopt does
not parse them, thus resolving the issue.

• in certain situations, parted created extended partitions which could

overlap the first logical partition. In these updated packages, the parted
utility avoids this behavior and instead creates aligned partitions, thus
resolving the issue.

• the parted utility defaults to creating MS-DOS partitions tables in

interactive mode. However, when creating a partition table for a device of
a size larger than MS-DOS partition tables can handle, it would still
default to creating an MS-DOS table. Therefore, an upper limit on the
maximum allowed size of DOS partitions was set in order to prevent the
creation of DOS partitions larger than 2 TB, which is unsupported by the
DOS file system.

• the parted info pages and help messages now warn the user that parted

does not currently support the ext3 file system.

All users of parted are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which
resolve these issues.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied.

This update is available via Red Hat Network. Details on how to use
the Red Hat Network to apply this update are available at
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_58_10188

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 5 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 5 ppc
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server from RHUI 5 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 441244 - parted breaks reloading logical partitions
• BZ - 449370 - parted info pages need update
• BZ - 450298 - Sub-command parameters conflict with option parsing - Documentation clarification required.

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)