Uninstall all...

Kwan Lowe kwan.lowe at gmail.com
Tue Dec 16 15:27:58 UTC 2008


I had an unusual problem during an update last night. It was entirely
my fault, but a little alarming.

I did a fresh installation via kickstart of Fedora 10 for i386 on a
VMWare guest. No problems. On first reboot I created a regular
account, su'd to root, then kicked off an update via the graphical
update tool. At some point it failed during the dbus update.  I exited
the update tool then restarted, but the update continued to hang. I
exited again and ran 'yum update' from the command line.  One of the
messages was that a previous transaction did not complete and to run
yum-complete-transactions, then messages about some dependency errors.
I ran the yum-complete-transactions but it also errored out. The
apparent culprits were dbus and mesa-libGL which was preventing newer
packages from updating.  An 'rpm -qa' showed that there were two
versions of dbus and libGL installed.  I tried to delete the older
package but there was a dependency error. I tried to delete the newer
but it was required for the newer update.  Eventually an 'rpm -e
--nodeps --allmatches' got rid of the packages. Reran 'yum update' and
it completed the dependency check and started the installation...

This was when I realized the root of the problem. /usr was 100% full.
I grew the filesystem by 500M then restarted the 'yum update' process.
It complained again and informed that I needed to run
yum-complete-transactions.

I ran yum-update-transactions.  There were a bunch of "Removing..."
messages.  Then it completed.

Then I tried to run 'yum update' again.  Command not found.

In fact, just about every binary related to yum and rpm were gone. So
was initscripts and lots of other low level utilities. I.e.,
everything that was set to be updated was erased without the update
going in.

In summary, a full filesystem and a subsequent
'yum-complete-transactions' can render the system unusable.

I'm going to rebuild from the same kickstart and see if I can
reproduce the error. Unfortunately, I was convinced that it was a dbus
error and didn't save many logs.




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