RHBA-2009:0977 - Bug Fix Advisory

Topic

An enhanced iputils package that fixes various bugs and provides an
enhancement is now available.

Description

The iputils package contains basic utilities for monitoring a network,
including ping.

This updated iputils package includes fixes for the following bugs:

• updating the iputils package resulted in the rdisc (network router

discovery daemon) being restarted, which in certain circumstances could
break network connectivity. With this update, the rdisc daemon is only
restarted if it was running before the update was initiated.

• the iputils update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 (RHBA-2008:0674)

included a fix for the arping command, which did not work over InfiniBand™
interfaces. The fix created a dependency on the libsysfs library, which was
therefore included in that update. The libsysfs library required the /usr
file system to be available at boot time, which could create problems for
thin clients or diskless systems.

This update removes the dependency on the libsysfs library, and also
therefore on the requirement for the /usr file system to be available
during boot time.

• when called with the "-w deadline" option, arping did not stop sending

packets after the expiration of the deadline. With this updated package,
using arping with the deadline argument results in arping exiting at the
correct time, thus resolving the issue.

In addition, this updated iputils package provides improved descriptions of
the "-c count" and "-w deadline" ping options in the ping(8) man page.
These descriptions provide more a more detailed account of the interaction
between these options.

All users of iputils are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which
resolves these issues and provides this enhancement.

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/docs/DOC-11259

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390x
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z Systems 4 s390
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, big endian 4 ppc

Fixes

• BZ - 465972 - Update of iputils starts rdisc, breaking network connectivity
• BZ - 474386 - Regression in arping (iputils-21.el4)

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)