Fixing APT Corruption

Wed 15 November 2006 by pj Tagged as ancient debian

A debian machine at work had some RAM go bad... in service. Which ended up corrupting something in /var/cache/apt, (I think pkgcache.bin). Which caused apt-get to segfault repeatedly. I had traces like

gettimeofday({1163625872, 123448}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1163625872, 123572}, NULL) = 0
--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) @ 0 (0) ---
+++ killed by SIGSEGV +++

and gdb traces like:

Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... 50%
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0xb7ec84d7 in pkgDepCache::CheckDep ()
   from /usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
(gdb) bt
#0  0xb7ec84d7 in pkgDepCache::CheckDep ()
   from /usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#1  0xb7ec918c in pkgDepCache::DependencyState ()
   from /usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#2  0xb7ec95c7 in pkgDepCache::Update ()
   from /usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#3  0xb7ec825f in pkgDepCache::Init ()
   from /usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#4  0xb7eea054 in pkgCacheFile::Open ()
   from /usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#5  0x0805e277 in std::vector >::_M_insert_aux ()
#6  0x08055069 in ?? ()
#7  0xb7ebcf3c in CommandLine::DispatchArg ()
   from /usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.3-5.so.3.3
#8  0x0805d706 in ?? ()
#9  0xb7c8f974 in __libc_start_main () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
#10 0x0804c5b1 in ?? ()

so if you run into this, just:

mv /var/cache/apt/ /var/cache/apt-
mkdir -p /var/cache/apt/archives/partial

and then 'apt-get update' and things will be fixed.

War on Terror Jingoism

Thu 21 September 2006 by pj Tagged as ancient commentary politics

A relative forwarded me an email spewing a bunch of jingoistic garbage, and I responded:

Radical Muslims:Islam :: KKK:Christianity

I'm not always an Andrew Sullivan fan, but the letter he reprints vividly demonstrates where attitudes like the below will get us - where they've already gotten us. "Liberty and Justice …

Politics-Oriented Software Development

Tue 01 February 2005 by pj Tagged as ancient humor

Originally found here

By TheophileEscargot
Fri Jan 28th, 2005 at 11:53:03 AM EST
	Software
		

  A brief guide to software development in the real world. Aimed mainly
at new developers: experienced programmers already know most of this.
This guide is for hands-on programmers, not managers.

BREAK

    Introduction

    Most textbooks …

*solutions

Thu 25 March 2004 by pj Tagged as ancient commentary

Reading this entry on Freedom to Tinker about why Fraunhaufer's 'Lightweight DRM' is doomed made me think, 'Yet again, well meaning people are championing ideas long shot down,' and reminded me of Cory Doctorow's form letter for people who think they've solved spam. So I decided to take a first … read more

Winer on Techies

Mon 13 October 2003 by pj Tagged as ancient commentary

I can't believe Dave Winer thinks that this opinion is news.

Business has always been about find a need (ie. a customer's desire) and answering it. However, I think he oversimplifies and doesn't give the techies their due when he says that 'Vision isn't coming from [them]"; customers have needs …

Photo Album software

Tue 07 October 2003 by pj Tagged as ancient personal news

I'm looking for a CGI to run locally that will turn my current mishmash of digital photos in a nice album. Some features I'd like:

the fewer actual CGIs the better
no MySQL necessary - it just seems like overkill, not to mention too much fragility
automatic generation of thumbnails and …

LiveJournal enabled

Thu 24 July 2003 by pj Tagged as ancient personal news

Well, I finally caved and got a LiveJournal Account, just so I could comment on other people's stuff. read more

Open letter to John Harell

Thu 12 June 2003 by pj Tagged as ancient commentary

To: John Harell
Subject: absolute copyright

> When I create something, that thing is mine.

I'm a programmer, so I know what you mean. I write software and bring it into the world with much blood, sweat and tears along the way. And yet...

I didn't create the language the software …

Word unter alles

Thu 24 April 2003 by pj Tagged as ancient commentary

Here is a great essay on one of my pet peeves, using Word (or excel, though there are fewer open alternatives) as a document exchange format. It used to be that you could advocate a neutral format by pointing out 'what if I don't have Word, but instead use WordPerfect … read more

Boot Scripts

Thu 10 April 2003 by pj Tagged as ancient personal news

Talking to a friend the subject of SysV-init vs BSD-style init came up. I like SysV's /etc/init.d component because it gives you simple on/off controls for all the system daemons, all in the same place, and named predictably. I don't particularly care for the 'runlevels' idea because … read more