[plug] dpkg error

[Craig Ringer]

Russell Steicke wrote:
> Any debian guru know how to fix this?...
I'm no guru but I'll sling some guesses at you.

> russells at bobby:~$ sudo apt-get install dpkg
> Reading Package Lists... Done
> Building Dependency Tree... Done
> 1 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 669  not upgraded.
> Need to get 0B/1073kB of archives. After unpacking 213kB will be freed.
> sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
> sh: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
You may have a problem.... out of memory, out of disk-space on /var, 
/tmp or /home, a weird ulimit set on the shell, or even too many 
processes (but that's a _lot_ of procs, and is unlikely unless you have 
a runaway fork()ing new ones constantly).

> The machine has plenty of free memory, and nothing else is saying that it 
> can't fork.
Weird, kinda knocks out the above. try cd /var/cache/apt/archives and 
then su (sudo isn't suitable for this) then
	strace dpkg -i <pkgfile> 2>&1 | tee /tmp/strace-log
and see if you can find out what the unavailable resource _is_. Doesn't 
always work, depending on language, point of failure, etc.

> The same error occurs when apt-getting anything, or using dpkg -i on any
> ..deb.  The debs I am trying to install are the correct size (or at least
> the same size as on a machine without this error.)
Hmm, nasty. Never seen this error before sorry, so I think a trace is 
the best you'll get. I'm interested to note that it reports "sh: fork"; 
perhaps dpkg is working fine, forking a shell to run any scripts in the 
deb, and they in turn are trying to fork a process - and that's where it 
fails? Just a guess....

You haven't set up any new security enhancements etc lately have you? 
Say, affecting /bin/sh or the kernel?

-- 
Craig Ringer
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	-- if it ain't broke, add features 'till it is. (or:)
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