Dear Friends,
I recently lost the disk dedicated to /usr. I happened to have plenty
of extra partition space and a /usr from a recent debian install on
another partition, so getting back up was only a matter of a few
minutes; no reboot required.
Needless to say, the package system now requires some attention as
many things which are still thought to be installed are missing all of
the files that were in /usr. The state of the package system seems to
be recorded on /var.
I have been able to remove and reinstall and so forth to bring some
things back into a good state, but things are not quite there yet.
For example I wrote a script to recursively check and install or
reinstall based on dependency info from apt-cache depends. That
helped somewhat as mozilla is involved in complex dependency
relationships. The script uses dpkg -L to check whether a package's
files are really there. Is there some kind of built in validator
similar to this?
In fact, the better to be instructed, perhaps I should simply display
my ignorance explicitly. Basically, I piped this apt-cache command
into the the following script.
# apt-cache --recurse depends mozilla-browser|grep "Depends: [^<]"|awk '{print
$2}'|sort -u|xargs -n 1 /chkpkg
# script chkpkg
# Check whether all files of a package are there.
# If not, perform a reinstall.
if ! dpkg -s $1 >/dev/null 2>&1; then
echo chkpkg installing
apt-get --assume-yes install $1
exit
fi
dpkg -L $1 | \
while read x; do
if [ ! -e $x ]; then
echo $x is missing for $1
apt-get --reinstall --assume-yes install $1
echo Reinstall attempt complete.
exit
fi
done
I have no doubt that I am laboring under various and sundry
misconceptions.
Can anybody offer me some general advice on how to repair the
situation?
I guess I could reinstall and start with a clean slate, but I'd rather
learn how to fix things directly. Moreover, when I installed from CD,
the boot kernel did not see my scsi, so it was somewhat inconvenient
to get the filesystems spread across several ide and scsi disks.
Someone suggested to me that perhaps I should have booted from a
different CD in the set. I am using a Linux Central CD set.
Anyway, clearly it should be possible to tell the package system
things like:
"I know it looks like this is installed, but it isn't." and "Please
stop trying to autoconfigure and deconfigure on the basis of
dependency".
I have been busy for a day learning all about these things, having
read over various manpages many times, but, as a brand-new debian user
I would be exceedingly grateful for any advice.
Thanks very much,
--
John M. Adams
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