-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I have a server running debian woody and I normally use dselect to decide which packages to install. I hadn't updated it since about July last year and I came along to install razor which was shown on the debian web site under "testing". In order to do this I needed to do a dselect update in order to find the version of the package that was on the server.
Of course, since its been a long while since the last update this then caused the download and subsequent update of about 230 packages. As you all know dselect causes them all to be downloaded (fortunately I have a cable modem connection) and then starts to update them one by one (I guess in some controlled order). Immediately after it had updated libc6 the script that is controlling the process failed and I can not install any more (segfaulted). I connect into that machine using ssh from outside and when things fail I can continue to run bash etc over ssh although random commands just segfault. Eventually I close ssh but at that point I can never connect again - it seems to get as far as the bash prompt (I get message of the day up) and then segfaults and the connection is lost. I assume that all I am doing is contining to run processes that are holding open the old version libc6 library file and therefore it still keeping the file until eventually the processes exit. At this point I have a nearly dead machine. I connect up a monitor (spare keyboard is always connected) and see the login prompt but cannot login (never prompted for password, straight back to login). Eventually I reboot the machine at which point sysvinit obviously runs but the /etc/rcS.d scripts never run and I am thrown straight into login prompts (on several tty) but cannot login. OK - I thought, will just load up by boot floppy with busybox dpkg and dpkg_deb on it. I have all the downloaded .debs (and I had them on another machine anyway - all I need to do is find which ones are needed to get as far as login and the manually expand the files in them and copy all the /lib /bin /sbin /usr/lib /usr/bin and /usr/sbin files in each deb so that I have a consistent good set. I concentrate on bash and the libpam libraries as that looks like it will give me the biggest gain. However after a few hours of this manual hell it still isn't any better. In the end I just revert to last nights backup (disk to disk every night - saved my bacon several times) by copying the /bin /sbin /lib files and the same in the /usr directory back over. I now have a working (but not upgraded) system again. In fact I can apt-get install razor and only razor gets loaded - but I cannot really get the whole system updated. What is happening here? It seems to me that I have a chicken and egg situation with no way around. I need to update libc6 AND the processes that depend on it at the same time. I can't update libc6 without screwing up some processes and I can't update the processes without then screwing up because of an old version of libc6. And if anything serious breaks I often end up loosing the network and then am completely stuffed. How is debian's packaging system supposed to handle a situation like this? How can I get up to date? At the moment the only thing I can think of doing is to download a testing CD image from somewhere and make a CD-R of it - then re-install the root partition (effectively blowing away the existing contents) - keeping the other partitions intact. I can re-instate /etc files from my backup once I have done that to get my old configuration back into working order. Anyone got any better ideas? and last question The only debian woody cds I can see out there on the net are in ".raw" format, but I am totally unable to find any reference as to what .raw format means and how to convert them to .iso files so I can burn a CD. How do I do that? TIA - -- Alan - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8P0vq1mf3M5ZDr2kRAhATAJ0Wa5iXjlTJJ9tgdgK6k6USFbv2AgCghaXb bis7brAPSY17Aveo9+lzdzA= =CY2W -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
