On 09/12/2012 04:19 AM, D Brandherm wrote:
Looks like we've found the source of the problem, I'd take these logs to
the retrospect folks.
Pat
Sounds like a plan. Thanks again to everybody for your help with this.
Dirk
Wow... 44G worth of log spamming over a password request. So that's what
a modern resource exhaustion crash looks like. Orders of magnitude huger
than the same sort of error 20 years ago!
I'm glad to hear you got everything straightened out.
It sounds like this was an rpm gone bad (or a routine unhandled by the
rpm script), so it should be easy for the packager to fix once he knows
about it. Packages that don't come through the Fedora process sometimes
get wacky based on expected/required user interaction.
The Fedora/RHEL rule is that no package installation process may ever
require user interaction as part of the installation. If interaction is
required (accept a license, set an account, set a default, initialize
something, etc.) it must be part of a "firstrun" process and not part of
the actual rpm installation script itself. So rpm is for moving data
into the system in a verifiable way, and firstrun procedures are for
initialization (particularly in cases where initialization may mean
something different from user to user).
Other projects have different rules, some rpm repositories don't follow
them either, and good luck finding a closed-source vendor that releases
compliant binary packages. On Debian/Ubuntu, for example, there are
packages that ask the user questions about defaults, etc. and therefore
hang if no user is present to answer -- which sucks horribly if it is
package #3 of a 1000 package routine. There are some that can't be
installed without an active GUI session in progress to send a query
window to, which is bad because even if X is installed as part of the
dependency chain there is no current session to query, hence another
problem, etc.
That means on those systems you can't remotely administer everything via
unattended scripts for installation or upgrade -- and problems like the
one you encountered are more common. (Hence there being more differences
than package selection between the "Ubuntu Desktop" and "Ubuntu Server"
versions, whereas over on this side they are just pre-defined package
collections.)
