yum-updatesd is totally broken

[Simon Andrews]

Danny Yee wrote:
> Kevin H. Hobbs wrote:
>> yum-updatesd is definitely leaking memory. I restarted it on Thursday
>> and now it's up to 917 MB.
> 
> I have not yet been able to get yum-updatesd to work at all, ever,
> on any one of the half dozen or more FC6 machines I look after.
> And whenever I look at a Fedora Core 6 system set up by someone else,
> I find it's not working there either.

Lots of people have been having lots of problems with yum (and 
especially yum-updatesd)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=212507


There has been nothing but a resounding silence from the package 
maintainer over this.

The best you seem to be able to hope for is that yum-updatesd fetches 
and installs updates but doesn't tell you (whatever log options you 
select!).  A more common scenario is that it leaks memory over time, and 
on many machines simply dies leaving a yum.pid lock in place and often 
corrupting the rpm database.

There are a couple of separate issues which cause rpmdb corruption but 
we've got a couple of machines where we regularly see corruption using 
updatesd and have had no problems at all since moving to a cron based 
approach (as was used in FC5).

Given that updatesd is a core part of the security infrastructure for 
fedora it's concerning that nothing has been heard from the package 
maintainer about this issue since November last year.


> So far I've been disabling yum-updatesd and replicating the old cron
> entry from FC5.  But there are plenty of FC6 users around here who
> don't know how to do this and don't even realise they're running
> without updates...

Same here, and I'm sure many people won't have noticed it's broken. 
Incidentally did you notice that the last yum update broke logging if 
you're using a cron based approach?

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=222835

I'd be interested to know if anyone has yum-updatesd working properly. 
By that I mean that it:

1) Downloads and installs updates automatically

2) Logs what it's done (preferably by syslog)

3) Doesn't leak memory / crash over time

If you've got this working please let others know your config (attach it 
to the bug linked above), so we can figure out what's going wrong.

TTFN

Simon.