[Yum] Yum service hangs

Michael Jennings mej at caosity.org
Wed Sep 1 18:29:06 UTC 2004


On Wednesday, 01 September 2004, at 09:44:19 (-0700),
Michael Stenner wrote:

> Yeah, that's crazy and a bit puzzling.

Tell me about it.  :-)

> Sadly, there really isn't a good way to do that.  You could, of
> course, run it in a debugger.  Other than that... try turning the
> debug level WAY up to see if you can figure out what's going on just
> by yum telling you what it's about to do.  The next step would be to
> go into the code and add extra logging to help pin it down.

I've increased the debug/error levels to 9999.  Running it
interactively in the python debugger or under gdb would be difficult
at best; the build process is entirely unattended and has no
controlling tty.  I have, however, been able to run yum under ltrace.
Interestingly, the problem occured less frequently that way, but it
still happened.  The log files, as you can imagine, were somewhat
large, and I was unable to get any useful info out of them.  I can set
that up again, though, if it would help you.

> Perhaps.  Basically, this is either a networking issue or it's not.
> If it is, then it's my domain.  In that case, I would ultimately be
> able to debug it with a regular account.  However, in order to
> determine if it's a networking issue and WHERE, I'd need to run a
> hacked-up version of yum as root.  Clearly, this could adversely
> affect your system.

Perhaps, but it would essentially have to do so intentionally.  The
chroot jails are replicated from a pristine original prior to each
package build; yum would have to break out of the jail to do anything
harmful.

> If you can do these initial stages, that would help.  Try and find
> out if it's hanging anywhere under a call into urlgrabber.  If so,
> find out what the args are.  From there, I can play with it.

The extent of my python hacking experience is beating anaconda into
submission.  Fortunately, what I've seen of the yum code is far more
encouraging.  I'll do my best to help, and I'll get back with you
off-list regarding what I find.

> Here's the thing, though.  In the current way of doing things, yum
> should KNOW it doesn't have an "expect" package because it's
> downloaded headers.info.  It's not like it needs to try fetching it
> to find out it isn't available.  (you have done a recent yum-arch,
> right?).

yum-arch is run after each and every build cycle, as is yum update.
Discussions with gmkurtzer and jbj pointed toward the __db.* files in
/var/lib/rpm, but eliminating those did not alleviate the issue (which
is why I've been inclined to blame yum's network interaction even
though issues over localhost seem unlikely at best).

Thanks,
Michael

-- 
Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX)  http://www.kainx.org/  <mej at kainx.org>
n + 1, Inc., http://www.nplus1.net/       Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org)
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