[plug] apt barfs

[Bernard Blackham]

Plug,

Debian is wonderful. Apt is cool. Or was, until I put debian (woody)
on my server (p133/32MB). And ever since, apt will always segfault
at least once in any operation. Whether it be midway through
building dependencies, or between downloading and configuring, it
will segfault or throw other strange errors. One such I just got
then:

---------------
[root at dagobah ~]# apt-get install traceroute
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  traceroute
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 164  not upgraded.
Need to get 21.0kB of archives. After unpacking 102kB will be used.
Get:1 http://localhost woody/main traceroute 1.4a12-5 [21.0kB]
Fetched 21.0kB in 1s (18kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package traceroute.
(Reading database ... 22786 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking traceroute (from .../traceroute_1.4a12-5_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing  (--configure):
 no package named `' is installed, cannot configure
Errors were encountered while processing:

Segmentation fault
---------------

It seems like something is being corrupted along the way. It is
quite a bizarre problem that really points to hardware. If it
segfaults on dependencies, sometimes doing "rm /var/cache/apt/*bin"
is sufficient, other times, I have to run a few random programs and
then it'll succeed.

If the dependencies are built fine, then it will segfault between
having downloaded and unpacking the packages and configuring them.
Running apt-get again finishes off the process.

It has been listed as a bug report at bugs.debian.org, has been
since last year, but none of the other 3 debian machines I've set up
using the same CDs have exhibited these problems. Has anybody
experienced the same problems?

Having thought about dodgy memory, I've run a memory tester on it
and it passed every time. Kernel's compile fine, and nothing else
acts up. Just apt. My holy grail. *sniff*.

Any ideas?

TIA,

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham
 bernard at blackham.com.au