Ubuntu server edition ā€œbrings the power of inexpensive shared storage to your serversā€. In particular, they tout DRBD support. Unfortunately, in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, DRBD won’t start at boot.

The bug wasn’t too hard to track down. The problem is the update-rc.d script (run in the package postinst) is parsing the LSB headers in the DRBD init.d script. The LSB headers tell update-rc.d to not include runlevel 2 (Ubuntu’s default) when installing symlinks, so none is made in rc2.d. Hence, the init script is not run during startup.

I put documentation and a debdiff (package patch) on the launchpad bug report. However, even though this package is in main, I have no faith this bug will be fixed by Ubuntu (see update below the fold). So, for your server’s enjoyment, grab the patched packages we are using at my company:

Add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://packages.devsuki.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main
deb-src http://packages.devsuki.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main

Grab the public signing key:

wget http://packages.devsuki.com/devsuki-signing-key.asc

Add it to your apt keychain:

sudo apt-key add devsuki-signing-key.asc

Otherwise, you can directly download the packages.

UPDATE (2009.01.27): According to what the ā€œLaunchpad Janitor wrote on 2009-01-26ā€, it appears this bug has been fixed in 2:8.3.0-1ubuntu1. However, this package appears to only be available in the development version of Ubuntu (jaunty) and not as an update to intrepid. I’ll post a question on the bug about it.