When I ran our setup on an instance the other day, I noticed how it failed with a "package not found" (or similar) error. After debugging this a bit, we discovered that Karmic moved from "archive.ubuntu.com" to "old-releases.ubuntu.com" (Probably diskspace or something — but who knows? :-)). And because the sources pointed to the former, it broke the bootstrap process on new and existing EC2 instances and Vagrant VMs for us. A truely consistent experience!
Whenever apt-get update is run in a chef-recipe and it exists with a non-zero status, the process is stopped. Of course there are ways to work around it (for example: ignore_failure true), but then again, most of these workarounds are hacks and not suitable for a production environment (IMHO, of course): we often discover new sources from launchpad PPAs and so on and it's paramount to want to know if discovery failed. You cannot assume that all went well
Scalarium fixed their AMI already and updated the sources to point to "old-releases". Running instances are of course still broken.
Enter apt-repair-sources
apt-repair-sources is a small (opinionated) tool written in Ruby.
It offers:
--dry-run (-d), which is the default--fix-it-for-me (-f), which attempts to correct all problems
The reason why apt-repair-sources was written in Ruby is, that I wanted a tool to run with only the most basic setup (on Scalarium). Since Ruby comes installed by default, it was my weapon of choice (vs. Python or PHP). Another advantage was that I had an opportunity to check out more Ruby (aside from cooking with chef) and used this project to learn more anything about testing in Ruby (using Test::Unit).
Dry run
A dry run can be used to essentially debug the sources on a system.
Here's the output of a dry-run, and all is well:
[email protected]:~/apt-repair-sources/bin$ ./apt-repair-sources
There are no errors in /etc/apt/sources.list
There are no errors in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chris-lea-node.js-lucid.list
There are no errors in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/node.list
There are no errors in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chris-lea-redis-server.list
There are no errors in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/silverline.list
Here's the output of a system, where sources are currently broken:
[email protected]:~/apt-repair-sources/bin$ ./apt-repair-sources
/etc/apt/sources.list: http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz
/etc/apt/sources.list: http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic/main/source/Sources.gz
/etc/apt/sources.list: http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic-updates/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz
/etc/apt/sources.list: http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic-updates/main/source/Sources.gz
/etc/apt/sources.list: http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic-security/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz
/etc/apt/sources.list: http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic-security/main/source/Sources.gz
There are no errors in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gearman-developers-ppa-karmic.list
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic-multiverse.list: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic/multiverse/binary-amd64/Packages.gz
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic-multiverse.list: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic/multiverse/source/Sources.gz
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic-multiverse.list: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic-updates/multiverse/binary-amd64/Packages.gz
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic-multiverse.list: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic-updates/multiverse/source/Sources.gz
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic-multiverse.list: http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic-security/multiverse/binary-amd64/Packages.gz
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic-multiverse.list: http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic-security/multiverse/source/Sources.gz
Problem?
Fix it for me
Fix it for me attempts to correct the sources like this:
- sources with *.releases.ubuntu.com are moved to archive.ubuntu.com
- sources with *.archive.ubuntu.com are moved to old-releases.ubuntu.com
- sources with security.ubuntu.com are moved to old-releases.ubuntu.com
On top of these things, it will check Launchpad and third-party PPAs as well, if an issue is found, it'll just disable the entry in the sources file (by commenting it out: #).
Future releases will probably re-check commented out entries and also attempt to do some kind of sanity-checking of entries using the release name, etc.. These things are hard though and it might be the wrong approach to be opinionated here because e.g. Lucid packages sometimes also work on Karmic. Disabling these might break other things, etc..
Here's a run:
[email protected]:~/apt-repair-sources/bin$ sudo ./apt-repair-sources -f
[email protected]:~/apt-repair-sources/bin$ echo $?
0
[email protected]:~/apt-repair-sources/bin$ ./apt-repair-sources
There are no errors in /etc/apt/sources.list
There are no errors in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gearman-developers-ppa-karmic.list
There are no errors in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic-multiverse.list
Great success!
Automation
Both modes usually exit with zero (0), which makes it easy to include them for bootstrap processes, general trouble-shooting or periodic cronjobs etc..
Reason to not exit with 0:
- attempt to run apt-repair-sources on another distro than Ubuntu
- old-releases.ubuntu.com is down
- you run with
-d and -f (which of course makes no sense :-))
- trollop (a rubygem i use for CLI option parsing is not found)
Setup
Gems!
# sudo gem install apt-repair-sources
Manually
- install Ruby Enterprise Edition (steal Karmic here; this should be your default anyway)
sudo gem install trollop (don't use what is in apt)- clone my repo:
git clone git://github.com/lagged/apt-repair-sources.git
cd ./apt-repair/sources/bin && ./apt-repair-sources
Todo
create a gem- add support for Debian
- improve my Ruby
Fin
Sure hope it's useful for someone else out there.
The code is on github, and I take pull-requests:
https://github.com/lagged/apt-repair-sources