apt segmentation fault???

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

I had an unusual, almost Windows-like experience today on one of my Fedora computers. I went to do my usual "apt-get update" with no problem, but then when I did an "apt-get upgrade" I got a segmentation fault about halfway through where it said "preparing."

I tried updating again, rerunning the upgrade and all that with no luck.

I googled it and did find one reference recommending deleting the *.bin files in /var/cache/apt. No luck there either. I did find references to the problem in the Fedora list that Red Hat maintains, but no solutions were given, just a coule of reports that it was happening to some users.

I did an "rpm -e" on synaptic (since it depends on apt) and then "rpm -e apt" I reinstalled and everything seems to be working. I just don't like that as a real long term solution.

Anyone know what's going on with apt and Fedora, and know of resolutions other than the slash and burn approach I used?

Jim Dishaw

[Void Main]

Was apt upgraded just prior to that (maybe on an "apt-get upgrade" or an "apt-get dist-upgrade")? Where was your apt from (FreshRPMS, dag, etc)? It's entirely possible you got a bad build of apt from your source that maybe they only had up for a short time. I have run an "apt-get dist-upgrade" on every one of my machines for the last couple of years and I have never had that problem. Maybe I'm lucky? :)

[Basher52]

isnt Segmentation Fault like bad blocks on the physical disk?
i thought so, thogh

[Void Main]

No, although a bad block on a hard drive could possibly cause a program to have a segmentation fault that is not likely the case. It is usually caused by a poorly written program (or rather I should say a programming mistake). It happenes when your program tries to access memory that hasn't been allocated to it. The good operating system will kill that program off for being "naughty" and display a segmentation fault error message (or core dump).

[dishawjp]

This was on my court machine. I was running the version of apt from http://apt.freshrpms.net using the rpm for Fedora Core 1. I hadn't done anything unusual that I can think of. I was using the standard freshrpms repository and had added the dag repository as well. It had been running fine for months. It's the same setup I have on my FC1 machine at home.

I hadn't done anything unusual with the machine. In fact, since the contents of that computer are particularly important to me, I'm rather conservative in what I do to it. The Office of Court Administration wasn't too happy that I installed Linux on "their" computer and I'd have some real explaining to do if I lost data as a result of doing that. I do an apt-get update and an apt-get upgrade about weekly, and very little else.

I don't really suspect a hard drive error, smartd seems to think everything is OK at least, and it is a fairly new Dell computer.

I just thought that it was odd and was curious if anybody here had run into a similar situation and found a better solution.

Jim Dishaw

[Void Main]

Hmmm, if you added the dag repository then more than likely when you did an upgrade it would have installed the dag apt package because I think it has precedence over the FreshRPMS version. I know on the machines I added the dag respositories on I did it by first installing their version of "apt". Another thing is, I put all of my repositories in separate files in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory and removed the /etc/apt/sources.list file. I have heard people have problems if they did not do it this way.

Here are the list of files I have in my /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory:

Code: Select all

atrpms.list
dag.list
dries.list
freshrpms.list
newrpms.list
os.list
void.list


The "os.list" points to my internal fedora os respitory and the "void.list" is my void main repository. The rest should have been installed with the dag apt installation.