Hi ! Thanks for all the hints about possible reasons for my problem. In my case, the first answer from Roman helped me to solve the problem: On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Roman Drahtmueller wrote:
I'm having trouble applying the new html2ps-1.0b1-428.i386.rpm to an up-to-date SuSE 7.0 machine. I downloaded the rpm from ftp.suse.com and checked the MD5 checksum which is ok. When I apply the rpm to my system with rpm -Fhv html2ps-1.0b1-428.i386.rpm nothing happens and I can't kill the command with Ctrl-C.
"ps l" reports (originally one line): 000 0 20608 19894 0 0 2328 992 leaf_m D pts/0 \ 0:00 /bin/rpm -U --hash --verbose -- html2ps-1.0b1-428.i386.rpm
According to "man ps", the status code "D" means: "uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)"
I can kill "rpm" with "kill -9 process-ID". If I do so, it takes some seconds until the rpm process is killed.
Is someone having the same trouble on a SuSE 7.0 ? Or could give me a hint what may be wrong ?
This looks like a problem with the filesystem or the harddrive underneath. Can you see something unusual in the output of "dmesg"? Please run the command with an "strace -tfvv" before on the commandline and see where it gets stuck.
--> "dmesg" did not show anything unusual. So I ran the rpm command with "strace -tfvv". It turned out that rpm froze at stat('/mnt/backup'.... where "/mnt/backup" is an NFS-mount. The NFS-Server was offline when I tried to use "rpm". I guess the problem was that "/mnt/backup" was not cleanly unmounted before the NFS-Server was taken offline (done by someone else). Maybe if I had waited very long, I would have gotten a timeout ? When the NFS-Server was online again, I could use "rpm -Fhv html2ps..." without problems. Best regards from the Baltic Sea! Armin -- Am Hasenberg 26 office: Institut für Atmosphärenphysik D-18209 Bad Doberan Schloss-Straße 6 Tel. ++49-(0)38203/42137 D-18225 Kühlungsborn / GERMANY Email: schoech@iap-kborn.de Tel. +49-(0)38293-68-102 WWW: http://armins.cjb.net/ Fax. +49-(0)38293-68-50