[Spacewalk-list] Cloning channels and deleting packages are a BAD idea...

m.roth2006 at rcn.com m.roth2006 at rcn.com
Fri Apr 3 16:17:16 UTC 2009


Spacewalk .4, CentOS 5.2

A cautionary tale o' woe.

I was creating new channels and children for CentOS 5.3, and was trying to save typing by cloning the child channels. I hadn't realized that cloning copied the packages in those channels. (There's an enhancement: a clone of a base channel that copies the child channels.)

So I went to delete the packages... and the system went to its knees, literally. Apache wasn't serving, and when I got fed up and tried to reboot, it took over half an hour (watching the clock). Came up - oh, and I noticed that osad-dispatcher was trying to start before Oracle did) - and when top finally came up (su'ing to root took literally minutes), it showed java eating 98% of the CPU. For what may be the second time in a long career, I reniced the java (+3), and within a minute, everything had returned to normal.

I was getting complaints on the console, so I restarted spacewalk, and everything's fine. I just deleted the rest of the cloned child channels, and recreated, and had no problems.

Btw, I'm looking at logs in /var/log, and can't find anything that relates to what happened. Not tomcat5, not httpd/error_log, messages....

     mark




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