Simon Krenger

With Debian 6, the Debian distribution made the jump to a dependency based boot sequence using LSB tags. So when you update your current Debian installation, you might encounter some problems when your scripts are not properly prepared. Such as the following message:

insserv: script vzreboot: service vzreboot already provided!

The full message reads like this:

info: Checking if it is safe to convert to dependency based boot.

error: Unable to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing.
insserv: script vzreboot: service vzreboot already provided!

See http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot for more information about dependency based boot sequencing. To reattempt the migration process run 'dpkg-reconfigure sysv-rc'.

Alright, so what does that tell us? With dependency based boot sequences, every script provides a service, which is described in the LSB header. This way, another script can depend on this particular service to be started when the script is run.

Now, if two scripts provide the same service, this will produce the error message mentioned above. So let’s find out which two scripts provide the same service:

root@atlas:/etc/init.d# grep "Provides:" * | grep -i vzreboot
vzquota:# Provides: vzreboot
vzreboot:# Provides: vzreboot

Uhoh, seems like our hoster screwed up. Both vzquota and vzreboot provide “vzreboot”. This is a problem, so let’s change the script /etc/init.d/vzquota. Open up your favourite text editor and change the following line

# Provides: vzreboot

to

# Provides: vzquota

Done! Now, you should be able to enable Dependency Based Boot Sequences in Debian.