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

[Mike McCune]

m.roth2006 at rcn.com wrote:
> 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....
> 

can you file a bug with the details from above:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Spacewalk

much appreciated,
Mike
-- 
Mike McCune
mmccune AT redhat.com
Engineering               | Portland, OR
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