Autoremove had some dangerous side effects

Help and Support
1

Hi All,

I thought it maybe worth posting this up for information purposes only.

The backgound!

I have 2 RPI’s, one of which was setup as an openvpn server. I recently had to reinstall so lost the function.

Roll on a few months and I decided to turn both of them into openvpn servers. Obviously I can only use one through the router. So I decided to remove the packages I had installed on the redundant PI.

I ran apt-get autoremove and answered Y. Didn’t check the screen so it removed the following:

armv7-bluez-osmc 
armv7-connman-osmc 
armv7-network-osmc 
cifs-utils 
curl
easy-rsa 
gir1.2-glib-2.0 
iproute2 
libelf1 
libgirepository-1.0-1 
libnl-3-200
libnl-genl-3-200 
libnss-myhostname 
libpcsclite1 
libpkcs11-helper1 
net-tools
openvpn 
python-dbus 
python-gi 
python-gobject 
python-gobject-2
rbp2-device-osmc 
samba-common 
wget 
wireless-firmware-osmc 
wpasupplicant

PI runs and the screen shows Kodi. Obviously the network is down but I’ve found a page that looks like it will help.

Failing that I’m more than happy to reinstall as I have it setup to access a local mysql db rather than local db.

I decided to do some checks on the remaining working PI with openvpn and it looks like there is a difference in what is removed depending on the command issued.

apt-get autoremove

does nothing as there is nothing to remove.

apt-get autoremove openvpn easy-rsa

ended with the removal of the above.

Oh well. Live and learn and it’s not like I’m going anywhere in lockdown!

BBloke

2

Autoremove on Debian tends to be very conservative in what it removes.

The title of this thread is arguably incorrect. The dangerous side effect occurs as a result of removing openvpn. Unfortunately, Sam has made openvpn a dependency of armv7-connman-osmc (and armv6-connman-osmc on the Pi1 and Zero). I don’t know why this is so but you’re not the first person to fall into this trap.

3

It’s one step towards making OpenVPN work out of the box

Sam