Re[2]: up2date crashed during update

[Stephen Gardner <stephen-rhel uk org>]

On Fri, 27 May 2005, Art Okunev wrote:

> Hello Stephen,
>
> Thursday, May 26, 2005, 8:21:54 PM, you wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 26 May 2005, Art Okunev wrote:
>
> > > Hello All,
> > >
> > >  We  are  running  RHEL  ES 3 update 4. Ordinary web sever - no third
> > >  party packages or heavy customizations. Server was regularly updated
> > >  using up2date without any problems.
> > >
> > >  Couple  of  days ago I decided to upgrade system to update5. Up2date
> > >  downloaded headers, downloaded RPMs, upgraded couple of packages and
> > >  then abnormally exited with error message.
> > >
> > >  Now when I trying to run up2date it dies with the following message:
> > >
> > > Traceback (most recent call last):
> > >  File "/usr/sbin/up2date", line 1174, in ?
> > >    sys.exit(main() or 0)
> > >  File "/usr/sbin/up2date", line 668, in main
> > >    up2dateAuth.updateLoginInfo()
> > >  File "up2dateAuth.py", line 151, in updateLoginInfo
> > >  File "up2dateAuth.py", line 105, in login
> > >  File "up2dateAuth.py", line 49, in maybeUpdateVersion
> > >  File "/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/up2dateUtils.py", line 228, in getVersion
> > >    release, version = getOSVersionAndRelease()
> > >  File "/usr/share/rhn/up2date_client/up2dateUtils.py", line 221, in getOSVersionAndRelease
> > >    raise up2dateErrors.RpmError(
> > > up2date_client.up2dateErrors.RpmError: RPM error.  The message was:
> > > Could not determine what version of Red Hat Linux you are running.
> > > If you get this error, try running
> > >
> > >                rpm --rebuilddb
> > >
> > >   Of course, I tried to do rpm --rebuilddb but it does not help.
> > >
> > >   Any suggestions?
> > >
> > >   I've  got  bunch  of  RPMs  in  /var/spool/up2date (which have been
> > >   downloaded  by  up2date  just before it crashed). Will it be a good
> > >   idea  to  install all of them manually or it would be better to fix
> > >   up2date first and then apply updates usual way?
>
> > Art,
> >    As a quick first thought on this one do you have a  /etc/redhat-release
> > file and / or a redhat-release package installed. The up2date client (for
> > whatever reason) seems to be unable to confirm which release of RHEL
> > you're running. I think that information should come from one of those two
> > locations. Getting and installing the redhat-release package might be a
> > solution.
>
> Well, it was my first thought as well - /etc/redhat-release is fine :(

Art,
  As a matter of interest do rpm related commands work?  (such as rpm -qa) 
In particular does  rpm -q redhat-release  return anything. I made this 
mistake earlier, up2date is querying the rpmdb to find the revision of the 
redhat-release  package you have installed, it doesn't read the contents 
of /etc/redhat-release. I re-created your problem by removing the 
redhat-release  package from one of my systems. It was easily fixable by 
re-installing that package (which you might need to do from the original 
media as, naturally, up2date won't work).

Regards,
  Stephen