Yum did it again

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 23 June 2005 00:31, seth vidal wrote:
>> >> Obviously I'm missing a
>>
>> point here
>> because historically I have had
>>
>> >> to forceably reinstall the older versions of libxml2 here
>> >> several times before to get yum to work again.
>
>where did you get this package from?

Usually by going back to the FC2 install disks and forceably 
overwriting the so-called updated version that broke everything.  Yum 
is not the only casualty, lots of other stuff that uses libxml2 is 
now similarly broken.  But I binned the FC2 disks to make room for 
the FC4's in my traveling cdrom kit last week when FC4 came out.

>> FC2 with lots of updates via tarball builds, but that should not
>> be related, I've (up till now) been carefull not to touch the
>> yum/python/libxml2 stuffs after getting burnt previously.
>
>updates via tarballs is a really bad idea.

That depends on whether or not you want a working system.  I did, I 
built this box to use it.  FC2 shipped with a broken version of cups 
that crashed and killed most of kde on any attempt to print from a 
kde app, including so innocent an act as just hovering the mouse 
pointer over the kde print manager line in the K-Menu popup.  I 
squawked a couple of times at the time and then started building 
newer versions of kde with konstruct, currently at 3.3.0, which did 
not fix it, finally discovering a line that was a clue in the cups 
logs 6 months later.  So I ripped out the cups rpms and started 
building cups, gimp, and gimp-print (now gutenprint) from tarballs.  
It all worked, no more crashes.  But because I like kde and not 
gnome, fixing that problem resulted in my not being able to use my 
printer from anything but the gimp for several months.  Fixing a 
problem perceived as a kde problem simply wasn't a very high priority 
to the RH/Fedora people.

I've no idea if a cups update from fedora has ever addressed that 
"kde" problem.  I put cups* in my exclude line to join several others 
I didn't want touched, but when I copy/pasted the new yum.conf, I 
forgot to grab that line from the older one.  My bad, and now I'm 
broken.

>> >what version of yum?
>>
>> yum-2.0.7-1.1
>>
>> >what version of libxml2 and libxml2-python are installed?
>>
>> libxml2-python-2.6.16-2
>> libxml2-devel-2.6.10-1.1.fc2.nr
>> libxml2-2.6.16-2
>
>does it strike you as alarming that those 3 don't all match?

No, the miss-match is in the devel file and shouldn't bother 
yum/python unless I start compileing them from scratch.

>> I've since tried to re-install the 2.6.10-1.1 stuffs but
>> apparently failed.  It was yum that upgraded it all to 2.6.16-2
>> this morning.
>
>so then yum is working?
>
No yum is not working, the updateing of the libxml2 stuffs from the 
2.6.10's that I did have installed, to the 2.6.16 stuffs, done by yum 
as part of a roughly 50 package update day before yesterday, killed 
yum.  The next time it was invoked, this is what falls out:
-----------
[root at coyote BOINC]# yum check-updates
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/yum", line 22, in ?
    import yummain
  File "/usr/share/yum/yummain.py", line 31, in ?
    import yumcomps
  File "/usr/share/yum/yumcomps.py", line 4, in ?
    import comps
  File "/usr/share/yum/comps.py", line 5, in ?
    import libxml2
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/libxml2.py", line 1, in ?
    import libxml2mod
ImportError: /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/libxml2mod.so: undefined 
symbol: xmlNewDocPI
-------------

For some reason, I'm having a hard time expressing that running yum 
broke yum.  But this is now the 4th time this has happened since I 
upgraded to FC2.

I just checked, I still have the FC2 iso's so I could burn another set 
and use those to recover to the FC2 release level of 
yum/python/libxml2.  Humm, they can be mounted but I don't recall the 
syntax.  It involves using the loop device I think...

>> There are pieces of python-1.5, 2.2, and 2.3 installed here.  Its
>> been that way since I upgraded RH7.3 to FC2.
>
>I'd like to show you to:
>http://torrent.fedoraproject.org
>
>go download an install disk and fix your system.
>
>-sv

I have not been able to get a torrent to work thru my home network 
Seth, which is locked down by iptables running between 2 nics in my 
firewall box.  And questions about how to cut holes in the iptable  
rules to allow a torrent, which needs 2 way comm, thru it have gone 
unanswered on several lists.  I think I do have suitable rules setup 
in my router, a Linksys BEFSR41 & all I have to do there is enable 
them. Unforch a tracker has never been able to connect.

I'm beginning to think I'd have to setup a third nic in the firewall 
box, and setup a DMZ in the router, and run the torrent in a sandbox 
on the firewall, but I do not have the networking expertise to set 
that up safely.  Also, the router does NAT, so everything on this 
side of the router has a 192.168.x.x address.  Its pretty tight, 
portsentry and iptables between them have logged 3 attempts to access 
my setup in a bit over 2 years, with 2 of those attacks coming from a 
compromised verizon dns, and I'm on verizon adsl.  I send verizon a 
nastygram, clean out my hosts.deny file and I have working dns again.  
Till they shut it down the next day for several hours to re-image 
their server.

In the meantime I do know how to run mozilla, wget, gftp & the rest of 
the file fetching utilities.

So what rpms do I now need to either update the python stuffs to be 
compatible with this new libxml2 stuff, or to downgrade the libxml2 
stuffs to regain python compatibility?

I do have FC4 final downloaded and on cd's & ready to go, but after 
the debacle in getting FC2 to actually do work here, my first install 
of FC4 is going to be an upgrade on a sacrificial FC3T4 box, not on 
this, my 99% working box.  Or are the rpms on the FC4 disks 
compatible with my version of rpm?  Historically not...

Another odd thing, when it did the update of about 50 packages from 
the legacy repo's, it did NOT store the downloaded rpms 
in /var/cache/yum, the new directories it made are empty so I cannot 
even reinstall the newer stuff.  That also seems strange.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.