[ATrpms-users] New problem with smart

[John Pilkington]

Paulo Cavalcanti wrote:
> 
> 
> On 12/2/06, *John Pilkington* <J.Pilk at tesco.net 
> <mailto:J.Pilk at tesco.net>> wrote:
> 
>     I use smart (on FC5) and have had no system-incapacitating problems with
>     it.  It does its job very well.  But during the past few weeks it has
>     occasionally locked up at the end of the 'rebuilding cache' phase.  I
>     have been able to get it working again by rebooting - maybe there are
>     less traumatic ways.
> 
> 
> 
> Something like this
> 
> [cascavel:/usr/lib] ps -A | grep smart
>  1967 ?        00:00:00 smartd
>  4960 ?        00:00:11 smart
> 
> sudo kill -9 1967  4960
> 
> should be enough to kill smart, although I think this should only be done
> as a last resource.

Yes, thanks, I did find that 'kill <PID>' by itself doesn't affect 
smart.    I haven't tried killing it this time, because it appeared to 
have exited by itself.

Once again I have noticed a persistent job running under anacron after a 
malfunction of smart.  This time it was rpmq that was devouring CPU 
time.  It was showing 3:40:24 a few minutes ago, after the Smart exit 
this morning.  The calling sequence (ps -AH) is  anacron, run-parts, 
rpmq, awk, atd.
> 
>     There were suggestions that the problem (which also affected other
>     depsolvers) might be caused by yum repeatedly accessing the rpm
>     database, and on one occasion I found apt-get was continuously active
>     under anacron without my knowing about it. 
> 
> 
> The only explanation is because the lines in
> 
> /etc/sysconfig/check4updates
> 
> are not commented:
> 
> # Whom to send the report to
> MAILADDR=root
> 
> # Comment the next line to suppress nighly smart update checks
> #SMART=yes
> # Comment the next line to suppress nighly apt update checks
> #APT=yes
> # Comment the next line to suppress nighly yum update checks
> #YUM=yes
> 
>  
Yes, I did this.  It seemed a good idea to uninstall as well.
> 
>     When I became aware of this suggestion I uninstalled both yum and apt.
> 
> 
> 
> None of them do anything unless they are called by you. For small 
> updates, I generally use only yum and I have never had any problem.
> 
> /Paulo Roma.
> 
> -- 
> Paulo Roma Cavalcanti
> LCG - UFRJ

Thanks for the response,

John P