Description of problem: We have systems where a file system (NFS) is unaccessible sometimes. Also there are file systems wher root has no access and will not have ever. In the later case we get just a "Permission denied" which is not nice but ok. In the first case yum will block forever. How reproducible: - Mount a NFS filesystem from a remote server - Switch off the remote server (or make it unavailable per iptables or other) - Try to install/remove packages with yum Actual results: It blocks Expected results: No block
What could it do? What other programs don't fail in this way?
Ehem, That it clearly a bug. There is no reason why yum should block when the filesystem is not releated to the path where to install. Ok, I did forget to mention that I mean to have the NFS filesystem in (for example) /home/.../... or /net/... or somethink absolutelly unrelated to any path yum is needed to access. To your question: I d not know any other program which fails this way. So this IS a bug. And a grave one too.
So you have a path like: /my/inaccessible/path ...and yum has problems with it? This only when installing/removing packages, yes? Does rpm work? As I seem to recall that rpm stats. mount points when it runs the transaction. So moving there, but it's NaB IMO or maybe a feature request.
Rpm in RHEL 6 only accesses and stat()'s paths actually relevant to the transaction, so it doesn't hang on unrelated things like NFS mounts. It's not backportable to RHEL 5 however due to the API changes involved.