yum hang updating FC4 x86_64 system

Eric Smith eric at brouhaha.com
Fri Oct 7 08:29:08 UTC 2005


I did a fresh install of FC4 on an x86_64 system (Tyan S2892 motherboard,
2G RAM, 3ware RAID controller).  The install went fine.  After a reboot,
I logged in, did an su, then "yum update".  It downloaded all the packages,
installed a bunch of them, then hung.  Killing the yum yielded a system
that was broken in mysterious ways.

Did another fresh install, then yum update.  Same thing happened.  Poked
at it some more, found that it was hanging in an invocation of useradd.

Tried doing an install of FC4 x86_64 inside a VMware 5.5 beta virtual
machine on an FC4 system at home.  Install went fine, yum update failed
in the same way.

Sometimes when it fails there is an /etc/passwd.LOCK or some such, but
sometimes not.  On the most recent attempt, there is an /etc/.pwd.lock

At first I thought maybe one of these lock files was getting left over,
and it was waiting to acquire the lock.  But deleting the lock file
doesn't get it going again, so I don't think that's the problem.
Furthermore, I can't kill or even "kill -9" the useradd process; even
after "kill -9" it's still hanging around in "D+" state (whatever that
is):

[root at localhost etc]# ps -C useradd -f
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
root     25933 25931  0 00:46 pts/1    00:00:00 /usr/sbin/useradd -c
Network Crash Dump user -r -u 34 -g netdump -s /bin/bash -r -d /var/crash
netdump
[root at localhost etc]#

I assume that useradd is being invoked as part of an RPM postinstall
script (or maybe preinstall).  The netdump user already exists before
the yum update.  The last time I did this it hung in useradd for a
different user, presumably as part of the installation of a different
package.

This seems *very* reporoducible, and not specific to the configuration
of the first machine I encountered the problem on.

Any bright ideas as to why useradd might be getting stuck?

Thanks,
Eric




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