apt-get bailing out every few updates

[Panu Matilainen]

On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Dag Wieers wrote:

> On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Dag Wieers wrote:
>
>> I've got a problem with apt lorg3.2 where apt bails out after every few
>> updates. So it has 36 updates pending and after the 3rd update it simply
>> stops with no error, the old packages have not been removed leaving the
>> rpmdb in an incosistent state.
>>
>> The system was an RHEL4AS with all updates applied. I enabled the fastrack
>> repository (official feature/bugfix updates that are pending for the
>> quarterly release).

...

>>
>> Is there some way to figure out what is going on ?
>>
>> Could the options that are being used to debug this be added as an example
>> to the apt-get manual page ? I couldn't find any.
>
> To make things worse, now I get this:
>
> [root at lxrh002 tmp]# apt-get install xrestop
> Reading Package Lists... Done
> Building Dependency Tree... Done
> The following NEW packages will be installed:
>  xrestop
> 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 removed and 32 not upgraded.
> FATAL -> Failed to fork.
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

> but the second time it did work:

...
> 31 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 removed and 0 not upgraded.
> Need to get 0B/15.1MB of archives.
> After unpacking 11.0kB of additional disk space will be used.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
> Committing changes...
> Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
>   1:groff                  ########################################### [  3%]
>
> Same problem. What can I do ?

I would check the system logs for any oddities and check the hardware for 
things like bad RAM.

If it was just the transactions crashing it might be worth looking at 
backtraces from the crash but a system that fails to fork new processes 
under normal conditions sounds seriously ill to me.

 	- Panu -