yum woes

[unsecretarygeneral]

problems with yum on 3 cl servers

[unsecretarygeneral]

Hi there,

Ive just went around our servers checking autoupdates are working as expected, and on three cloudlinux servers when running a yum update im seeing :

Transaction Summary
================================================== ================================================== ================================================== ================================================== ================================================== ===============
Install 5 Package(s)
Upgrade 105 Package(s)
Remove 1 Package(s)
Reinstall 0 Package(s)
Downgrade 0 Package(s)

Total size: 131 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
memory alloc (8 bytes) returned NULL.

the servers in question have ram available

Cpu(s): 35.2%us, 11.8%sy, 0.3%ni, 45.7%id, 6.4%wa, 0.2%hi, 0.6%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 8164376k total, 7920012k used, 244364k free, 382612k buffers
Swap: 8385848k total, 120k used, 8385728k free, 4797204k cached

ive googled on the error, and there appears to be no immediate gotchas, any clues would be nice.

best regards
Kev

[iseletsk]

Another customer reported same problem today.
Could you provide me with output of: uname -a
And if you run ksplice

Also, it seems it fails on
yum update kernel-devel in particular (and that is the package with largest number of files), we are yet to figure out what might be causing it.

[iseletsk]

It seems the issue was caused by combination of two things:
1. update of RPM package with lots of files in it, and those files being removed (like kernel-devel package, with /usr/src/kernel/<dir_for_that_kernel> removed
or filesystem package and /usr/share/man directory being removed)
2. ulimit virtual memory setting being low.

After doing:
ulimit -v 1000000
I was able to fix the issue for other customer.
Check if it fixes the issue for you as well.
In general -- if you think you have similar issue, due to file removal, try uninstalling packages instead of just removing files.

You can also increase virtual memory on permanent bases by setting it in limits.conf http://linux.die.net/man/5/limits.conf
for root user. Try setting data parameter.

[unsecretarygeneral]

Thanks worked a charm !

Kev