Well, for me anyway.

To summarize: You attempt to install Debian Etch security updates for the samba suite; all programs install except for samba; aptitude tells you so and complains that it cannot configure swat because an old version of samba is installed and that rc2.d and rc3.d symlinks for samba are dangling; you check the links and you observe that, somehow, the system sees them as executables; you remove the links and do: ln -s ../init.d/samba S91samba for rc2.d and rc3.d and 'aptitude -f install samba'(you may omit '-f', aptitude already knows :0 ); all is well until the next samba update.

This has been reported as Bug 54385, three years ago. It is interesting that it seems to affect only a few scattered people within a distro group. I never had a problem with samba until its last security update in Etch, several months ago, and again this morning. The Bug has also appeared in Debian-based distros. Not a real big deal but it is annoying.

I am running regularly updated Etch on an Acer laptop which make a normally happy pairing. However, on those rare occasions when a reboot is required, such as an kernel security update, dhclient can't find its leases and my wireless optical mouse loses sync. Coaxing dhclient to take another look and fiddling with mouse reset and such are unhelpful.

Has anyone experienced this and found the culprit?

Decided to try the new Update Manager in Etch which, I see, is just a front-end for synaptic. It brought up the most recent security updates [samba (16May07)], I accepted, and the manager proceeded to completely hose samba and all its related packages; samba, samba-common, samba-doc, smbclient and swat. Aptitude says samba is the broken package but cannot repair it and goes into dependency hell saying it can't repair it because of swat, then samba-common and on and on nor will it remove, purge or reinstall samba or any of the related packages.

Anyone else run into this and find a fix?