On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 12:08:08PM -0600, P. Larry Nelson wrote:
> Hi,
> Is anyone else seeing last nite's update "hang" on SL5.1 systems?
> Near as I can tell, it's hanging on cups-1.3.7-11.el5_4.3.
> 
> I have 3 SL5.1 systems (all the 5.3 systems updated just fine)
> that I did not get yum cron email from this morning, so went
> investigating.
> 
> A 'ps auxw | grep yum' on one of the 5.1 systems yields:
> root     10050  0.0  0.0   2372   960 ?        S    02:55   0:00 /bin/sh 
> /etc/cron.daily/yum.cron
> root     10051  0.0  0.0   2124   580 ?        S    02:55   0:00 awk -v 
> progname=/etc/cron.daily/yum.cron progname {?????   print progname 
> ":\n"????? progname="";????       }????       { print; }
> root     11422  0.1  3.1  58104 49768 ?        S    03:53   0:46 
> /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/yum -c /tmp/yum.temp.config -e 0 -d 1 -y update

No hung yum processes for me this morning (mostly SL5.2 systems, a few
SL5.0) and yum.log shows all the updates as being installed, but I
have noticed something a little odd.  Some (not all) of the yum.cron
emails this morning included the message:

There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider running
yum-complete-transaction first to finish them.

Running yum-complete-transaction gives the following messages (among
others):

Removing:
 cups                          i386   1:1.3.7-8.el5_3.6       installed   9.8 M
 cups-libs                     i386   1:1.3.7-8.el5_3.6       installed   317 k
 nfs-utils-lib                 i386   1.0.8-7.2.z2            installed   103 k
 popt                          i386   1.10.2-48.el5           installed   121 k

and then a stream of messages about other stuff which also needs to be
removed, so I aborted the command when given the chance.  yum update
worked normally (it updated the kernel but nothing else).

I wonder if it's significant that "yum list cups" mentions only one
version:

cups.i386                      1:1.3.7-8.el5_3.6                       installed
but the other three packages mentioned all seem to have two versions
installed e.g.:

cups-libs.i386                   1:1.3.7-8.el5_3.6                     installed
cups-libs.i386                   1:1.3.7-11.el5_4.3                    installed

Eva.