On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 08:09:32AM -0800, Terry Hancock wrote: > > Hi, > > Apt-get and dpkg work so well I hardly ever have to > think about how they work. Unfortunately, this means > I'm pretty clueless when something does go wrong. > > I have two computers which apparently have damaged > dpkg systems -- the status or package databases seem > to be corrupted or destroyed. > > For example, attempting to run apt-get update results > in this error message (after checking for packages > data from the Debian site): > > Reading Package Lists... Error! > E: Could not open file /var/lib/dpkg/status - open (2 No such file or > directory) > E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened. > > (looks like I've made a blunder somewhere along the line!)
Ouch. That file is *important* - as you've just found out.
Can you remember what the last (successfull) dpkg (or apt-get) commands
were? Since it has happend on *two* of your machines, I would suspect a
bug in dpkg.
Could you make backups of /var/lib/dpkg/* and /var/backups/dpkg.* asap?
They may be of value for the dpkg maintainer. You may want to contact
him, as he would know better what to look for.
> The other machine constantly sends email to the administrative
> email address complaining that various packages aren't being
> found in a database of some kind (I forget what the exact
> message is).
>
> It seems like there ought to be a way to have dpkg do
> a consistency check/repair of some kind (I though of
> reinstalling dpkg, but then do I need dpkg to install
> dpkg?). I'm sure there must be some facility for doing
> this, but I haven't found anything by just doing searches.
Re-installing dpkg wouldn't (necessarily) help, as the
/var/lib/dpkg/status is a status of currently installed packages. At
worst, you'll end upd with an empty one. YMMV.
> Is there a standard way to fix a corrupt dpkg system?
Backups. Backups. Backups. Preferably ankle-deep.
> The only thing I can think of at this point is to
> manually backup all the user data areas and reinstall
> the whole system, but that's pretty painful, so I'd
> really like to try something less destructive.
dpkg *should* keep backups in /var/backups/dpkg.status*.
You may succeed by copying /var/backups/dpkg.status.0 to
/var/lib/dpkg/status. Beware though: This may result in dpkg's idea of
what is installed becoming out-of-sync with reality. If you have
installed/removed anything since the backup was made, expect to have to
re-install/re-remove it to sync things up.
Hope this helps
--
Karl E. Jørgensen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.karl.jorgensen.com
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lp1 on fire
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