Greetings.  We're running a mix of Scientific Linux (SL) versions on 
Intel and AMD processors.  All of our "production" systems are still 
running SL 3.0.3.

We noticed some time ago that the daily cron job to do yum updates 
(/etc/cron.daily/yum.cron) was "hanging" routinely.  I.e., there would 
routinely be various yum-related tasks in the 'S' (sleeping) state on 
our systems.  These sleeping tasks would prevent the yum cron job from 
running on succeeding days.

We never found out the cause of the problem, but we did alleviate the 
problem by removing yum.cron and scheduling our own daily yum updates. 
Logically I wouldn't have expected there to be any difference in the 
results produced by the two methods, but things did seem to work better 
after removing yum.cron.

Nevertheless, regardless of the yum voodoo that we try to apply, we 
still are plagued by the "hanging-yum" problem.  I was recently on 
vacation for about a week, and I found half a dozen or so systems with 
suspended yum-update jobs when I returned.

I'd be glad to get suggestions for ways to eliminate this problem. 
Maybe just updating to a newer version of SL would be enough to do the 
trick?

Thanks.

					- Mike
-- 
Michael Hannon            mailto:[log in to unmask]
Dept. of Physics          530.752.4966
University of California  530.752.4717 FAX
Davis, CA 95616-8677