[SOLVED!!] - Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

About those error messages...

Apologies but earlier in the thread you wanted to know what the next lines of the error output was...

It goes like this...

Setting up/ dbus (1.2.16-0ubunut9) ...
The system user 'messagebus' already exists. Existing.
Failed to open connection to "system" message bus: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing dbus (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of packagekit:
 packagekit depends on dbus; however:
 Package dbus is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing packagekit (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving uncofigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of hal:
 hal depends on dbus (>= 1.2.16-0ubuntu3); however:
 Package dbus is not configured yet.

This continues on and on with a whole host of other packages.

Maybe this is enough to kick off a new tack again...


Anyway, you just posted about ps axf | grep dbus
this returns the following:

1484 ?    Ss    0:08 dbus-daemon --system --fork
5609 tty1  S+    0:00        \_ grep dbus

Thanks,

Mark.

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

OK. The installation of dbus is (was?) hanging and kicking off all the other dependencies. Have you tried this after starting dbus? If that doesn't work use

service dbus restart

and try it again. If that fails you will probably need to edit the postinst script to make it complete.

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Yes - I've now tried both a

sudo aptitude -f install

and a

sudo dpkg --configure -a

I still get exactly the same failures each time.

So then, how do I edit the postinstall script to make it complete. Do I need to find a copy somewhere and replace the original one? Or just edit the one that's there.?

Cheers.

Bag

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

First try to run it and see if it generates exactly the message you were seeing. That is

/var/lib/dpkg/info/dbus.postinst --config

Edit: That should be

/var/lib/dpkg/info/dbus.postinst configure

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Running:

/var/lib/dpkg/info/dbus.postinst configure

returns the following:

The system user 'messagebus' already exists. Exiting.
start: Job is already running: dbus

Interesting...

Bag

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

That is exactly what it returns when I run it on my system. Edit that file and add a line

set -x

righe after set -e. Then run

dpkg --configure -a

again with the redirection so we can see the output. This will cause this script to show us what it is doing.

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

OK then, so it gives me a lot more output... some interesting stuff...

I first updated the file as you mentioned - then ran the command:

sudo dpkg --configure -a > configB.out 2>&1

This output a file called configB.out with loads more information in it. To be honest, it's a little difficult to tell what will be useful to you - and with it being 379 lines long, I don't want to type it in longhand!!!

I'll mention the stuff that stands out to me the most...

It starts by saying that it's setting up dbus (1.2.16-0unbuntu9) ...

Then there are a bunch of lines starting with a +, with what I presume is information about what the script is running.

It says that "The system user 'messagebus' already exists. Exiting"

PID=5646

Then just before the next error message it says:

+ dbus-send --print-reply --system --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus / org.freedesktop.DBus.ReloadConfig
Failed to open connection to "system" message bus: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing dbus (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1

This might be what you need. After this - it seems to go through the same thing that we've seen before - multiple failures to resolve dependency issues because it cannot configure files...

Cheers.

Bag.

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Making progress now. The script is reading a pid file to get the Process ID of the dbus process. Does taht process actually exist? Based on what you showed me before I am thinking it does, but check it again with

ps axf | grep dbus

Then do

ls -l /var/run/dbus/

The system_bus_socket= should have the same timestamp as the pid file. I expect it does not exist, and I hope that you can create one by running

service dbus stop

followed by

service dbus start

. If so you should see the dam break and a flood of configuring happen with the next dpkg --configure -a.

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

How I wish you were right...!

Running

ps axf | grep dbus

gets me the following:

6174  tty1  S+  0:00        \_ grep dbus
6157  ?     Ss   0:00  dbus-daemon --system --fork

Then running:

ls -l /var/run/dbus/

returns only:

total 0

Then I stopped dbus, restarted it - and ran a "sudo dpkg --configure -a"

Unfortunately, it does not give me anything... Obviously that's because of the "total 0" - but what does that mean?

Cheers.

Bag

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

The total 0 says there are no files in that directory. That explains why the socket could not be found but it does not explain why the script thought there was a PID associated with dbus. After you start dbus

ls -l /var/run/dbus/

should show

total 4.0K
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5 2009-11-07 14:26 pid
srwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2009-11-07 14:26 system_bus_socket=

The pid file should contain the PID of the dbus process and the socket is a special file for communicating with the process. So after you ran

service dbus start

is there still nothing in /var/run/dbus/ and does dpkg --configure -a still show a pid for dbus, and is it the same one as before or a new one?

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Stopping and restarting dbus gives different pids each time. That's something that is shown up when the script is restarted, it reports the process number. Currently it's 6310.

However, running "sudo ls -l /var/run/dbus" still shows "total 0"

Of course, I did not bind (have now unbound) /var from the disk and so which system does it refer to - the one on my hard disk, or the Live CD-ROM?

For info, running 'dpkg --configure -a' and redirecting the text to a file shows that it is using PID=6310 as well.

Bag.

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

There should be consistency. If you start dbus in the chroot it should assign a process there and use /var/run in the chroot. It was started outside the chroot when you booted from the CD and that should use /var/run in the CD system. In the chroot environment you should not have access to the dbus in the CD environment but should be able to start one and then access it.

[barbolani]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

mondo is right, to be 100% sure you should stop the dbus service (and almost all other services) when running from CD before issuing the chroot. Otherwise the utilities that deal with those services will look for the chrooted /var folder and be confused and assume that the service is not running.

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

I was thinking like barbolini, but could not understand how the postinst script, using status dbus in the chroot, was finding the pid of a process in the CD environment. It must be accessing this through the /proc/ or /sys systems. I think what you need to do is stop dbus in the cd environment with service dbus stop, check it with status dbus, then in the chroot, start dbus with service dbus start, and check it with status dbus as well as looking for the pid and the socket in /var/run/dbus. If the socket shows up dbus will probably upgrade and your upgrades will continue. I suggest that you mount /boot before you run dpkg --configure -a if the socket gets created.

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

OK, so I've tried all that. It doesn't advance me anywhere. Shame really, 'cos I was hoping that it would finally break the dam...

I stopped the dbus process outside the chroot and verified that it had stopped.
Then I chrooted and started it again. A status check shows it as having a PID of 3938. However, checking by running "sudo ls -l /var/run/dbus" still shows up the same old...

"total 0"

Very disappointing.

I mounted the boot partition anyway, and tried the usual two commands - but as expected, they fail out with too many errors.

This is starting to get a bit long in the tooth now... I know that many people are following this - and offering advice, but unless I can break this deadlock today or tomorrow morning, I'm going to have to admit defeat and just reinstall from scratch with the downloaded CD-ROM that I have.

Any last attempts from people would be most welcome. Many thanks,

Bag.