[Spacewalk-list] scheduled rhn_check on Ubuntu failed to configure with dpkg

[Paul-Andre Panon]

On Tuesday, July 25, 2017 at 11:41 AM,   Robert Paschedag [mailto:robert.paschedag at web.de] wrote:
>
>Hi,
>
>I think the problem is that one or more packages are running some  "debconf" with "dialog" frontend that is not catched in background.
>
>I also had this one or two times that I recognized that on some server"rhn_check" was hanging but did not find a solution for that. Fix was to kill the hanging task and run "rhn_check" interactive *I think*.
>
>Could have also been "apt-get install"...
>
>Robert

Thanks for the reply. I think I previously may have seen what you indicate, resulting in Spacewalk scheduled installation events to report as failed, but I'm not sure if it would have been that. In those cases we've usually just re-run rhn_check interactively without killing any processes and dealt with the prompts (usually confirming or rejecting configuration file changes for sudoers, pam, or networking). This looked different because of the incomplete package installation status - Spacewalk showed the packages as green and installed even though the configuration phase was incomplete ( at minimum resulting in kernel initrd ramdisk files not created and kernels not loading), where this time I had to run dpkg --configure to finish the installation. On the other hand, I don't see what would have been different about those previous failures for the latest set, so perhaps I have just not noticed the incomplete installation aspect when it happened previously. It looks like I will have to do more non-interactive testing during our next patching cycle.

Paul-Andre Panon
Senior systems administrator

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