Manually built aprx on Ubuntu 20.04 - how to fix problem parsing config file when run as a service

[g0hww]

TLDR version - on Ubuntu and other Debian related distros apparmor may break aprx installed with the traditional configure,make,make install process in a confusing way. Instead prefer to build a deb package as per the instructions in the INSTALL document.

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Long winded version -

I have been using aprx installed from native apt repo for a while, then noticed that updates had been made on git so I decided that it was time to build the latest version and use that.

In my haste, I went for the bog standard configure,make,make install approach, which required some fettling of the init script to cope with the different path to the executable, as the --prefix option to the configure script was not respected.

I was surprised to find that the aprx service was failing, with errors produced in the log file indicating that every single filter clause in the config file (apart from those in the aprsis section) was failing to parse.  This didn't make much sense to me, as the config file had been good for quite a long time. Even more confusing was that manually running the aprx executable (rather than as a service) produced no complaints about config file content and behaviour was normal.

I was baffled and asked my friend EI7IG if he had any ideas.  His  response was to suggest that I looked into apparmor.  He hit the nail on the head with that suggestion.  I realised that there was an apparmor.aprx file in the source and that the make install process did nothing with it.  I noticed however that debian/rules installed the apparmor file and thought that building the deb package and installing that instead might work.

I ran the traditional "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot" command but that didn't work, so I resorted to reading the INSTALL document and then tried again with "make make-deb".

This worked perfectly and after installing the freshly minted deb package, everything worked swimmingly!

I'm not sure how apparmor made the aprx service fail to parse the config file.  This was pretty baffling.

Hope this is useful to someone.

Cheers, 73

Darren, G0HWW