[Spacewalk-list] recent apt updates resulted in removed spacewalk client on Ubuntu 16.04

[Paul-Andre Panon]

Hi,

We batch our update packages to be able to have a testing cycle on dev/test systems prior to applying them in our production environments. This applies to all three of our Linux Distribution/version streams in use at this site: CentOS7, Ubuntu 14.04, and Ubuntu 16.04. In our latest cycle, we lost the apt-transport-spacewalk, rhnsd, and rhn-client-tools packages when performing rhn_check to deploy the packages. To fix the problem I had to switch sources.list back to Ubuntu repos, remote the spacewalk source.list.d entry, re-install the missing packages, and then switch the sources.list files back to a spacewalk configuration. 
When re-installing the spacewalk packages the following packages also needed to be re-installed from the Ubuntu repo:

  python-apt python-cryptography python-dbus python-dmidecode python-enum34 python-gi python-gobject
  python-gobject-2 python-gudev python-idna python-ipaddress python-openssl python-pkg-resources
  python-pyasn1 python-rhn python-six

The package updates in that batch most likely causing that incident were

    apt-1.2.25-X.amd64-deb
    apt-transport-https-1.2.25-X.amd64-deb
    apt-utils-1.2.25-X.amd64-deb
    libapt-inst2.0-1.2.25-X.amd64-deb
    libapt-pkg5.0-1.2.25-X.amd64-deb

or

    libpython-stdlib-2.7.12-1~16.04.amd64-deb
    python-2.7.12-1~16.04.amd64-deb
    python-apt-1.1.0~beta1ubuntu0.16.04.1-X.amd64-deb
    python-apt-common-1.1.0~beta1ubuntu0.16.04.1-X.all-deb
    python-gdbm-2.7.12-1~16.04.amd64-deb
    python-minimal-2.7.12-1~16.04.amd64-deb
    python-twisted-bin-16.0.0-1ubuntu0.2.amd64-deb
    python-twisted-core-16.0.0-1ubuntu0.2.all-deb
    python3-apt-1.1.0~beta1ubuntu0.16.04.1-X.amd64-deb
    python3-distupgrade-16.04.24-X:1.all-deb
    python3-update-manager-16.04.12-X:1.all-deb

The really weird thing is that the copy of those apt packages on the Spacewalk server's filesystem date back to Sep 29. And the python packages back to Nov. So that leaves me wondering, why did it try to apply now if the file was downloaded (or created) that far back? We've run many patching cycles since then. I want to try to figure out what's going on before I try to bring our production systems up to date.

Paul-Andre Panon
Senior systems administrator