On 09/12/2012 04:19 AM, D Brandherm wrote:
>> Looks like we've found the source of the problem, I'd take these logs to
>> the retrospect folks.
>>
>> Pat
>
> Sounds like a plan. Thanks again to everybody for your help with this.
>
> Dirk

Wow... 44G worth of log spamming over a password request. So that's what 
a modern resource exhaustion crash looks like. Orders of magnitude huger 
than the same sort of error 20 years ago!

I'm glad to hear you got everything straightened out.

It sounds like this was an rpm gone bad (or a routine unhandled by the 
rpm script), so it should be easy for the packager to fix once he knows 
about it. Packages that don't come through the Fedora process sometimes 
get wacky based on expected/required user interaction.

The Fedora/RHEL rule is that no package installation process may ever 
require user interaction as part of the installation. If interaction is 
required (accept a license, set an account, set a default, initialize 
something, etc.) it must be part of a "firstrun" process and not part of 
the actual rpm installation script itself. So rpm is for moving data 
into the system in a verifiable way, and firstrun procedures are for 
initialization (particularly in cases where initialization may mean 
something different from user to user).

Other projects have different rules, some rpm repositories don't follow 
them either, and good luck finding a closed-source vendor that releases 
compliant binary packages. On Debian/Ubuntu, for example, there are 
packages that ask the user questions about defaults, etc. and therefore 
hang if no user is present to answer -- which sucks horribly if it is 
package #3 of a 1000 package routine. There are some that can't be 
installed without an active GUI session in progress to send a query 
window to, which is bad because even if X is installed as part of the 
dependency chain there is no current session to query, hence another 
problem, etc.

That means on those systems you can't remotely administer everything via 
unattended scripts for installation or upgrade -- and problems like the 
one you encountered are more common. (Hence there being more differences 
than package selection between the "Ubuntu Desktop" and "Ubuntu Server" 
versions, whereas over on this side they are just pre-defined package 
collections.)