[bulug] Re: Odd Ubuntu problem

Hmm, I haven't used Ubuntu in a while.  Know if our mirror keeps a revision
or version history that we can examine?

If the removal of the ~350 packages was due to the removal of a dependency,
I'd suspect that the dependency was removed last (you'll need to test this
on something less critical to make sure).  If this is the case, you might be
able to pinpoint the removed dependency (that caused the packages depending
on it to be removed) by seeing which package was removed last.

I'm curious though, did the desktop do all this by itself (automatically)?
Or was someone using it when it happened?

Did anything else happen during that session?  Was any package updated?  Was
the package list reloaded?

-Jimmy

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 1:33 AM, Benjamin Kraus <bkraus@xxxxxx> wrote:

> I had very unusual problem happen with my Ubuntu desktop earlier today.
> My girlfriend called me at work to tell me that my Ubuntu desktop (still
> running Maverick) had rebooted itself, and was having trouble starting.
> After a little digging, I suspected that perhaps an automatic update had
> failed and went to check my /var/log/dpkg.log to see what packages had
> been updated. That is when I discovered that roughly 350 packages had
> been removed from the system, including "acpi-support",
> "ubuntu-desktop", "xorg", "nautilus", "metacity", "compiz", "cpp",
> "gcc", "g++", etc. It is as though someone picked one very essential
> package, and forced it to be uninstalled along with all dependencies of
> that package.
>
> Needless to say, my computer wasn't working quite right. I just spent
> several hours going through the log and making sure to reinstall all the
> packages that were removed. Thankfully, once the packages were
> reinstalled (and after fixing my display drivers), everything was back
> up-and-running, and as far as I can tell, no actual data was lost (all
> the packages that were removed left their configuration files behind).
>
> I can't come up with any good explanation as to what may have caused
> that to happen. However, one thought that crossed my mind was a broken
> package had been delivered as part of an update, causing some kind of
> cascade effect.
>
> I'm writing the list for two reasons:
> 1) I use http://www.lug.bu.edu/mirror/ubuntu/ as my Ubuntu repository,
> and I'm wondering if anyone else on this list who uses the LUG
> repository had any similar problems yesterday.
>
> 2) Does anybody have any explanation as to what may have happened to
> cause the problem?
>
> - Ben
>
> --
> Benjamin Kraus
> bkraus@xxxxxx
> Ph.D. Candidate
> Biomedical Engineering Department
> Boston University College of Engineering
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