Good point....We need to think of a more robust solution for that - one that doesn't depend on application developers taking it into account.

Perhaps JEmplode should : rw, chmod 000 /etc/preinit.d/ , ro, reboot, rw, chmod 770 /etc/preinit.d/ (whatever...only the root user exists), and then do the install/upgrade. Brute force I know, and if something went wrong during the upgrade, the user would have to use ftp to chmod /etc/preinit.d back again, as telnetd/sshd wouldn't be running. But it should work.