Curious problem with Ubuntu auto-update – (solved)

I ran into a small problem today, somewhat connected to my earlier auto-update post some months ago.

Recapping the earlier post, Ubuntu has a built-in update process which dose a brilliant job at keeping everything up-to-date.  The down side is that users have to go through a more-or-less daily chore of accepting the update suggestions.  My post showed how to configure the updater to do it’s work silently.

So far, so good.  A few days ago though, I noticed my CPU usage constantly pegging at 100%, making the system sluggish, though not unusable (more or less like Microsoft Windows on a good day ).  I didn’t know it at the time, but it the problem seems to be due to an update dependency which required access to the original installation CD.  While running updates in the background, the system had no way of indicating that it needed the CD.  Opps.

I tried running the update process manually, but it failed to obtain the update process lock – this was another clue that the system was stuck in the automatic update process.

Next step was to kill the automatic update process.  Open a terminal, run top to see the offending process name (apt-get), run ps -e|grep apt-get to find the process ID, then sudo kill xxxx to kill it.  Still using 100% cpu, I ran top again, this time finding the auto-update process hogging the system, use ps and kill again to nix this one.  CPU usage now back to normal – whew!.

Returning to the GUI, I ran the update process manually again, which then downloaded some 64 out of 66 updates before showing a dialog asking for the original installation CD – ah-ha!  Luckily for me, I still had one; so popping it in the drive allowed the process to finish without further incident.

I’m guessing the auto-update process running in the background was unable to show the dialog asking for the CD.  I tried looking through the log files (see System Log Viewer) and found what might have been a clue in the bootstrap.log – apparently, my system was reporting a host of pre-dependency problems – things like bash depending on dash which was not installed etc.  Maybe this was ubuntu’s way of letting me know it was in trouble.  If so, it could have been clearer…

I don’t know if everyone else running auto-updates is also having this problem, if so – maybe my experience will save them time and frustration.  Good luck

Michael