More software update crashes
Hi, The software updater system tray icon indicated today with an orange exclamation mark that there are some updates to download. So, I said go ahead and update (there were about five or six to do, I think). After reaching 17% (from watching gkrellm, one package had been downloaded and installed), all network traffic, CPU and disc usage ceased. I waited for several minutes, then killed the software update process. I restarted the software update process, but now it hung at the "retreiving updates" stage. So, I killed it again, and restarted zmd for good measure. (rczmd restart failed, so I manually killed the zmd processes before rczmd restart again, which now worked). Neither zmd nor zen-updater were using any CPU, disc or network for some time before I did this. Then, I restarted zmd, and ran software update again. This time I got two error dialogs, containing the following crash information: ====== System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object in <0x003d6> Novell.Zenworks.Gui.ZenTrayIcon:CheckUpdatesLoop () in (wrapper delegate-invoke) System.MulticastDelegate:invoke_void () ====== and another, which was much longer (and probably more useful), but which I couldn't select since the one quoted above was application-modal and on top. When I dismissed this one, the other and the software update window disappeared. Now, when I restart the updater, I get only the one above, and it immediately exits. zmd appears to be running OK. Invoking Software Update from YaST produces a long pause followed by a "Another process is accessing the package database. Package management will not work!" then exits. Anybody have any ideas? I'm about to reboot the system. -- Bill Gallafent.
Well, after a reboot there were five updates available, which downloaded and installed OK. I can provide logs for the earlier crashes if anyone's interested; otherwise, it must surely be getting towards the time for another updater update, so I'll just wait for that.
William Gallafent wrote:
Well, after a reboot there were five updates available, which downloaded and installed OK. I can provide logs for the earlier crashes if anyone's interested; otherwise, it must surely be getting towards the time for another updater update, so I'll just wait for that.
I have found that when the updater fails and can't continue, just logging out will often get it going again.
William Gallafent wrote:
Well, after a reboot there were five updates available, which downloaded and installed OK. I can provide logs for the earlier crashes if anyone's interested; otherwise, it must surely be getting towards the time for another updater update, so I'll just wait for that.
I have installed 10.1 now on about 8 machines. It is tricky to get the update mechanism stable and reliable but in every case I have one the battle and the machines all update now without any special effort. Unfortunately I haven't accurately captured the procedure I use and I have no idea if I am wasting steps to get to the successful end goal. I always do the following: 1) Go to YaST2 and click on "Online Update Configuration" 2) Click on "Online Update Setup" 3) Look to see if the Software Updater ICON (Blue, Orange, or Red) is present in the bottom right. If so click on it and go through the process of adding the root password to give you the user authority/permission to use it. 4) Do not use the orb to download anything yet or you will just get errors. 5) Go back to YaST2 and optionally look at "Installation Source" to make sure a repository was added by #1 above. 6) Click on Online Update and get any patches available. Do not make any modifications to the list. Usually I get new replacements for rug,zmd and anything else dealing with the updater mechanism that came initially broken. 7) When that completes, I usually reboot to make sure that I am using that which was just received. 8) I then go back to YaST2 and repeat the Online Update seeing if anything more would like to come my way. Sometimes I reboot and sometimes I don't depending on what I see come down the pipe. 9) Repeat as necessary. 10) After that I just use the Orb at the bottom right an all seems to go smoothly.
participants (3)
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James Knott -
Robert Lewis -
William Gallafent