[plug] Attempt to upgrade mailserver failed

[Patrick Coleman]

On 2/12/07, Bret Busby <bret at busby.net> wrote:
>
> Below is the output of the failed upgrade.
<snip>
> Can someone please explain to me, why fetchmail no longer can operate as
> a daemon, and why the system upgrade attempt failed? The packages that
> are withheld from the system upgrade, include the critical utilities,
> such as fetchmail, postfix, and apt. Why these are withheld, would also
> be useful to know.

Hi Brett,

Firstly, the upgrade failed because you hit 'n' when it asked you
whether you want to install unauthenticated packages, so apt aborted
as it is supposed to do. The packages can't be authenticated because
you don't have the appropriate public key installed. To fix this, try
running:

gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys 6070D3A1
gpg --export --armour 6070D3A1 | apt-key add -

as root and see if that helps.

It's probably not a huge problem to say y and go ahead anyway - you
will be installing unauthenticated packages, however (which means
there's no protection from someone hacking into the repository server
and swapping a good package with a rootkit, for example. Not that it's
likely to happen :).

Secondly, the reason why some packages are held back is because you're
only doing an upgrade, which does not allow packages to be removed or
added - only upgraded. This means that if a package depends on another
package that isn't installed, or conflicts with a package that IS
installed, then it will be 'held back'. To tell apt to go ahead and
add or remove packages, run 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.

After running that, and before agreeing to what it's going to do,
check that the list of packages to remove doesn't include any you
really need or have spent ages configuring. Chances are though that if
a package is being removed it's because it's been replaced with a
better version of the same thing.

Hoep that helps.

-Patrick