rpm and segmentation fault
In a lovely day, I woke up and went to work feeling nothing but happiness. And as I usually start my days, I opened the office door, sat down on my uncomfortable chair, opened putty session to my outdated RHEL 4.7 machine and my browser to our Red Hat Network Satellite server web page.
"My machine has lots and lots of messing security patches. I think I'll update every thing.", I said.
next thing, my fingers were typing "up2date". Once Enter was pressed, a huge smile acquired my face.
"I will tell them I am updating my machine and can't work for 20-30 minutes", I thought.
seeing the command trying to fetch packages. fetching, fetching, fetching, .... "Segmentation Fault". WTH .... I did not believe this thing. I tried searching and searching around and around. I found a couple of nice posts (can't remember them, I closed them once I solved the problem :P) and tried what they suggest. One of them used strace to trace the root of the problem. Guess what big guy, i DON'T KNOW A THING ABOUT STRACE. I am not a quitter tho. So, I ran "strace -f -o /tmp/strace up2date thunderbird". in less than a second, the command line appeared asking me for another command. I said "What??? my machine is da*# fast.".
I opened /tmp/strace, and guess what. It was empty. I removed the "-o /tmp/strace" and tried again. An output there was. weird huh??
I checked the output and there was a weird path, "/var/spool/up2date". "lemme check it", I said.
Once I did, i found out that there were old headers in there. So, as a noobie usually does, I deleted them. I ran "up2date" again and this time it came with another error message. something related to not having enough space.
I found later that /tmp was full. Therefore, trynig to write to /tmp did not work (no warning message though). I had to delete everything there and ,,, that solved the problem.
just to sum up:
- /tmp was full. cleaned it. (you might need to use "lsof /tmp to see /tmp (deleted??) opened files and kill the PIDs)
- clean /var/spool/up2date/
sorry, had to write this post really fast. I need to do some remote installation :).
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