[UPDATE] – after further testing it seems it is machine specific I guess my ram is going bad. dag nabbit.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for about five years, and Debian I have been using since 1998.
This is a first for me. I came into the office and Ubuntu was prompting to upgrade some packages, I run 10.04 LTS – which is the stable build. I said go for it, and it tried, and failed.
I tried again, and failed, and again and failed.
I went to the CLI and it failed there too – dpkg/apt was seg faulting –
[1639992.836460] dpkg[31986]: segfault at 500006865496 ip 000000000040b7bf sp 00007fff71efdee0 error 4 in dpkg[400000+65000] [1640092.698567] dpkg[32069] general protection ip:40b7bf sp:7fff73b2f750 error:0 in dpkg[400000+65000] [1640115.056520] dpkg[32168]: segfault at 500008599cb2 ip 000000000040b7bf sp 00007fff20fc2da0 error 4 in dpkg[400000+65000] [1640129.103487] dpkg[32191] general protection ip:40b7bf sp:7fffd940d700 error:0 in dpkg[400000+65000] [1640172.356934] dpkg[32230] general protection ip:40b7bf sp:7fffbb361e80 error:0 in dpkg[400000+65000] [1640466.594296] dpkg-preconfigu[32356]: segfault at d012 ip 00000000080693e4 sp 00000000ff9d1930 error 4 in perl[8048000+12c000] [1640474.724925] apt-get[32374] general protection ip:406a67 sp:7fffea1e6c68 error:0 in apt-get[400000+1d000] [1640920.178714] frontend[720]: segfault at 4110 ip 00000000080c50b0 sp 00000000ffa52ab0 error 4 in perl[8048000+12c000]
I have a 32-bit chroot to run things like 32-bit firefox, and I had the same problem there. For a moment I thought maybe I have bad ram or something, but turns out that was not the case. There is some sort of bug in the latest apt 0.7.25.3ubuntu9.14 (I did not see a report on it, though the UI for Ubuntu bugs seems more complicated than Debian’s bug system), which causes this. I was able to get around this by:
- Manually downloading the older apt package (0.7.25.3ubuntu9.13)
- Installing the package via dpkg (dpkg -i <package>)
- Exporting the list of packages (dpkg –get-selections >selections)
- Edit the list, change apt from install to hold
- Import the list of packages (dpkg –set-selections <selections)
- apt-get works fine now on 64-bit
However my 32-bit chroot has a hosed package status file, something else that has never happened to me in the past 14 years on Debian. So I will have to figure out how to correct that, or worst case I suppose wipe out the chroot and reinstall it, since it is a chroot, it’s not a huge deal. Fortunately the corruption didn’t hit the 64-bit status file. There is a backed up status file but it was corrupt too (I think because I tried to run apt-get twice).
64-bit status file:
/var/lib/dpkg/status: UTF-8 Unicode English text, with very long lines
32-bit status file:
/var/lib/dpkg/status: data
I’m pretty surprised, that this bug(s) got through. Not the quality I’ve come to know and love ..
This is the exact reason why we stay on Debian Stable instead of Ubuntu, even if we don’t get the newest features. Too many times has Ubuntu let critical bugs through their updates.
Comment by mb — October 17, 2012 @ 12:15 am
Hi,
I had the same issue, I first tought it was the motherboard then the CPU then finally found your blog and most of all the ‘update’, run memtest and voila, same issue memory died.
Thx for this good tip…
Comment by mymycracra — November 14, 2012 @ 4:17 pm
thanks for the comment! Glad the post could help someone else out. I’ve *never* had that issue before myself(and have had bad ram on lots of occasions!). In my case the IT department put really crappy memory in my system when I asked to get upgraded. They have since replaced it all with better quality stuff..
Comment by Nate — November 14, 2012 @ 4:46 pm