[26180] in Athena Bugs
linux 9.3.11 - 9.3.16: update
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Camilla R Fox)
Sat Nov 13 17:30:42 2004
Message-Id: <200411132230.iADMU8Sx021053@red-herring.mit.edu>
To: bugs@mit.edu
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 17:30:08 -0500
From: Camilla R Fox <cfox@mit.edu>
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
System name: red-herring.mit.edu
Type and version: i686 9.3.16 (with mkserv)
Display type: nVidia Corporation NV5 [RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro] (rev 15)
Shell: /bin/athena/bash
Window manager: ctwm
After a hang (no mouse cursor, pings but nothing else) which I attribute
to the peicewise xscreensaver module, I rebooted red-herring, then tried
to update it from 9.3.11 to 9.3.16.
It spent half an hour appearing to install RPMs normally. When
it reached 100%, it just sat there. An hour later, I decided to
investigate, and found that an rpmupdate was running; it had no
children. I straced it, and found only:
futex(0x908a004, FUTEX_WAIT, 0, NULL <unfinished ...>
I kill -9'd it, the update failed, and when I reran the update,
rpmupdate quickly removed a list of packages, then exited successfully,
so I assumed all was well and rebooted. (This all happened on
Thursday.)
Today I noticed that my rpm binary and in fact much of the contents of
the rpm rpm were missing. (Notably not the contexts of /var/lib/rpm
although the __db files were missing.)
I copied in the missing binaries (only things that I presumed were not
system dependant) and /usr/lib/rpmrc from another system.
I still seem to be sort of screwed, though:
red-herring.mit.edu# rpm --rebuilddb
error: unrecognized db option: "db3" ignored.
red-herring.mit.edu# rpm -qa
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
no packages
Do I have any good options for recovering? The system is up and
functional, but I'd like to refresh my backups before doing anything
more drastic.
What should I have done when confronted with the hung update?
Jonathon mentioned an update problem on a cluster machine, that sounded
similar; do we have other evidence that this might not be isolated?
-Camilla
