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I am working on a project in a fairly advanced ubuntu environment. The machine I am working on is part of a cluster and is running an opennms monitoring server. Since I started on this project I noticed there was a dpkg proces running in the background:
This process is unkillable and doesn't even flinch at a kill command.
This in itself is not a problem, I assume that when the server is rebooted i t will disappear, but now every dpkg install command hangs on unpacking the package.
Code:
root@opennms0302:~# apt-get install libsmi2ldbl
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Suggested packages:
snmp-mibs-downloader
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libsmi2ldbl
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 95 not upgraded.
Need to get 359kB of archives.
After this operation, 1,053kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://be.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/universe libsmi2ldbl 0.4.8+dfsg2-2 [359kB]
Fetched 359kB in 0s (862kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package libsmi2ldbl.
(Reading database ... 60221 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libsmi2ldbl (from .../libsmi2ldbl_0.4.8+dfsg2-2_amd64.deb) ...
There are no error messages what so ever. I spent the better part of the day researching this problem and tried various dirty techniques to solve this. I went in and tried to remove the broken packages by hand. I also used "dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq", "apt-get clean" and "dpkg --configure -a".
I have yet to restart the server, but I doubt this will resolve the problem and it might not be easy to get the server up and running again in the cluster. The problem is getting critical though, because new plugins need to be installed for the OpenNMS implementation.
Any suggestions are welcome, I know I gave limited information, but that is because there are no error messages thrown anywhere.
It just repeats the last 2 lines forever. I moved the output file of strace to prevent the file getting to big.
The problem is that dpkg is waiting for some kind of I/O, but it is not receiving anything and just sits there forever. As for why it won't let me kill it, I do not know. I will continue to research the problem, but I appreciate any help I can get.
ps: Thx for the suggestion Evo2.
Edit:
As most people having this problem seem to blame their file system, I will post my /etc/mtab:
After some inquiry I found out nothing was installed since the cluster volume was set up, so I assume my problems originate from there. Now the question is, how do I solve this?
From the strace it seems to be man-db related. I'm just guessing here but does man look in /cluster? Ie did you edit /etc/manpath.config to include /cluster? Also, what happens it you try to install/configure the package with /cluster unmounted?
From the strace it seems to be man-db related. I'm just guessing here but does man look in /cluster? Ie did you edit /etc/manpath.config to include /cluster?
I did not change the manpath.config, but to share config between the main and the fail over OpenNMS server there are symlinks going from some folders in /etc to the cluster. So that way I guess dpkg is trying to access the cluster, but I don't see why that should cause any problems.
Quote:
Also, what happens it you try to install/configure the package with /cluster unmounted?
Some, if not most, of the installs will want to write at least some data to the cluster (through symlinks). Also, unmounting the cluster would mean taking the server out of production, which might be a hard sell towards my PM.
I think I will continue by looking for a solution to get dpkg to follow symlinks and access the cluster.
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