[CentOS] Yum update frozen

Mon Sep 11 21:58:55 UTC 2006
Vincent Knecht <vknecht at club-internet.fr>

Le lundi 11 septembre 2006 22:50, M. Fioretti a écrit :
> On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 22:33:36 PM +0200, Vincent Knecht
>
> (vknecht at club-internet.fr) wrote:
> > erm, well, I got that too (freeze of yum update in cleanup stage).
> > When I finally went to the console, the server was spitting lots of ext3
> > (filesystem) error messages :-(
> > I had no other option than restart the barbarian way (I had the magic
> > SysRq disabled, so maybe you can avoid that),
>
> SOrry, what is, in this case, the "barbarian way"?

It was simply turning the machine off using the power switch, then power it 
on.

> This is a remote 
> server on UM Linux. What I can do is to log in at the emergency
> console, or whatever the ISP calls it, and type a halt command
> there. Is this what you are suggesting?

  Well, I couldn't log in in any way (via console or sshd), so I had no other 
choice. In your case you may have other options since you seem to be able to 
somehow log in.
  At any rate, if the system just sits there doing nothing, you'll have to 
interrupt it one way or the other...

> Also, I don't understand the "magic SysRq disabled part. What do you
> mean?

  It's the kernel.sysrq setting as seen in /etc/sysctl.conf, which might work 
to send some last-resort command to not-so-uglily shutdown a machine even 
when Ctrl-Alt-Suppr doesn't work. I'm not sure that applies to your setup, I 
never used nor really learnt about UM Linux (User Mode Linux I guess).

> > So I'd say check if there are messages on the console
>
> typing C-z, C-c, what?

  I just got error messages scrolling over all virtual consoles, without 
typing anything. Again, I don't know if something special should/could be 
done given your setup.
  If console shows nothing special, I'd say 
check /var/log/yum.log, /var/log/messages and "dmesg" command output.