daemon() failed

[Darren Tucker]

Joel Ebel wrote:
> A friend of mine is having an issue running sshd as a daemon.  I don't 
> have full access to this box, so troubleshooting may be difficult, but 
> from what I can gather, the call to daemon() is failing.  sshd -D works 
> fine, but sshd -e returns "daemon() failed: Success"

That probably means the daemon() call returned a failure error code but 
did not set errno.

> which is in and 
> of itself funny.  This is Slackware 10.0, with openssh 3.8.1p1 and glibc 
> 2.3.2.  I have several slack 10 boxes with this same combination that 
> work fine, so he must have done something funny, but I can't figure out 
> what.  I reinstalled both openssh and glibc to make sure they were all 
> there, and ran ldconfig.  It didn't fix the problem.  I'm kind of 
> stumped as to why the call to daemon() would fail.  Any ideas?

Check config.h for HAVE_DAEMON, if it's set try commenting it out and 
rebuilding (make clean && make).   This will use OpenSSH's own 
replacement function.

-- 
Darren Tucker (dtucker at zip.com.au)
GPG key 8FF4FA69 / D9A3 86E9 7EEE AF4B B2D4  37C9 C982 80C7 8FF4 FA69
     Good judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, the experience
usually comes from bad judgement.