[rhn-users] fatal unpack error during up2date -u

[Jim Pelton]

Hello List!

Here's a tricky one for ya!  We've got a RHN proxy server, through which 
we communicate with a RHN satellite server.  Now the proxy is working 
great.  It seems to be communicating correctly with the satellite server 
and downloading rpm patches to its database.  I have a test machine 
running which applies updates downloaded from the proxy via up2date.

The issue is this:  we ran up2date -u (from the command line) on a 
client machine and during the install phase of the update, the process 
died completely.  This error was issued: "There was a rpm unpack error 
installing the package: gnome-applets-2.2.2-2.1E."  Normally one would 
restart the process, assuming that it would pick up where it left off.  
RPM is supposed to be quite robust correct?  Well, up2date -u (as well 
as up2date -l) claims that the system is up to date but something like 
30 packages where not installed--they where d/led however as they where 
confirmed in /var/spool/up2date.  If we log onto the satellite server 
the system is claimed to be up2date there as well.  The output of "rpm 
-qa | nl" shows 507 packages, the same as the satellite server.  The 
interesting thing is that if we "grep" the output of "rpm -qa" with a 
package name that was not installed before the fatal rpm unpack error, 
not even the old package is shown as being installed!

We wiped out /var/spool/up2date in an effort to "trick" up2date into 
downloading and installing the packages again but we now know that 
up2date does not even look there for confirmation of what it has downloaded.
So what could the problem be?

Thanks is advance, I understand this is probably more of an RPM issue 
but since it does involve a lot of RHN stuff I thought I'd post here anyway.

--Jim