Server crash

[Jani Partanen]

On 1.1.2013 15:22, Anders F Björklund wrote:

>> I have hit problem with smart on my centos 5.8 box. I had issues to upgrade system with v0.52, what is latest build for centos, so I did build 1.4.1 myself. I got system up to date. (0.52 did hangs to dependency check forever)
>
> Assuming you mean that _Fedora EPEL_ won't update their Smart package
> beyond 0.52 ? Also having some issues to get Fedora to fix* their later
> packaging as well, to update their repo configuration beyond "13.89"...
> ("fedora-package-config-smart" needs to be replaced with the yum plugin)

Yeah they haven't upgrade smart for some reason, about configs I don't 
mind because they can be fixed manually.

>> Now that issue is back with 1.4.1 and it's not only that it hangs smart, it will crash whole server if you forget it and let it run background long time. Server has crashed now 2 times. It goes unresponsible, nothing works, won't even remove screen blank with keypress so only option is dirty boot.
>
> Hmm, upgrading from 0.52 to 1.4.1 is like 5 years or something but I can't
> think of anything that would make it crash like that - except for running
> out of memory and starting swapping, or otherwise eating too much resources.
> Which repositories do you have enabled, beyond the regular ones from CentOS ?

Server is build around E5345 xeon with 18G mem. I have old dual xeon box 
with 1G mem running Fedora 17 with much more repos and it doesn't have 
any issues, sometimes it takes lot of time but it will do what I want.
This CentOS box was running just fine after I rebuild smart to 1.4.1 
until about week ago I made upgrade what went fine, I usually do anotger 
upgrade after succeed upgrade and sometimes smart does find still 
something to do.

> There is nothing stopping Smart from working like it always did, but the
> funding and thus the development moved back to using apt and yum again...
> So the last roadmap was more looking at Win / Mac, and porting to Python3.
> But it seems like there might be some renewed interest to fix the existing.

Main reason why I started to use smart years ago was priority settings 
for repos and even single packets. Yum didn't have that feature back 
then, don't know of apt-get but I don't like it much.
Main reason why I have want to switch back to yum now is that endless 
dependency calculation hang, it has got better but it's still there.
With yum plugins priority is now possible so there ain't in theory 
anything holding me back. Only that I have so used to work with smart 
and it's configs.

I'm gonna try out disabling some repositories and then if it won't hang, 
I start to enable them one by one to find out what is causing it to 
hang. But if it's memory leak, then it's something new because so far 
hang haven't cause any heavy memory use. It just eat one core and some 
memory, thats all.

Anyway if I'm forced to switch to yum, I always have a good memories of 
my stunts what I have done with smart ;D Biggest I think was one fedora 
installation upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit :P Yeah I know it's silly, 
but it wasn't any important server, if I had loose it, won't have been a 
big cry. I'm just lazy and wanted to test if I can take shortcut ;)

> So what do you see in the future ?

Well let me check to my crystal ball... ;P

I don't know, I think future will tell us :)


// JiiPee