[SOLVED] Linux shutdown unexpectedly after apt-get

[ishaypeled]

Hi guys,
Ive upgraded my system from pentium 4 to Athlon 64 dual core, after booting the new system with the old HD (fairly straight forward), I wanted to upgrade some packages. After running apt-get the system suddenly shuts down. This repeated on every boot.

Thinking this had something to do with the new system migration, I've decided to reinstall Debian squeeze (was a good time to upgrade anyhow, as I wanted a 64 bit system), so I got the netinst cd and again, when apt-get is run (from the install system this time), the machine shuts itself down!

Any help is appreciated here
-Ishay Peled

[nixblog]

Sounds strange to be honest. What happens if you use aptitude instead of apt-get?

[shankap]

well, you need find out what is the exact problem. What you can do is, have a live CD (ubuntu) and boot up. try "apt-get update " and see. If it works, then you need to check out your distro. Debian has a lot of distros which are suitable for AMD systems. try one of them. cheers

[bleedingsamurai]

So when you say shutdown, do you mean switching to init run level 0 (i.e. killing processes cleanly, and powering off the machine) or it just turns off as if the power cord was pulled?

If it is switching to run level 0 I would first run

ls -l /usr/bin | grep apt

and see if apt-get has become a symlink to halt or shutdown. As dumb as that sounds I have encountered a similar issue after family members did full version updates on Ubuntu installs.

And either way, I would have a look at the logs. If memory serves your package manager should have its own log file.

nixblog makes a great suggestion also, try using aptitude to see what the results are.
Try installing raw DEB packages with dpgk.
If dpkg works you might get away with removing apt-get which is a front end to dpgk and then reinstalling it with dpgk to hopefully clean up whatever corruption or bad configuration is causing this odd issue.

[ishaypeled]

Well, I finally nailed it.
It is a strange problem indeed and it's root cause is a faulty on-board LAN component.
By shutdown I mean sudden death shutdown, power is simply dropped to the board.
With small amount of bandwidth (e.g web pages) everything's peachy, but when I tried running heavier stuff (e.g wget), I noticed the shutdown again, having only used apt-get for heavy traffic, I assumed it was apt related.
I ended up disabling the onboard LAN and using an external card, and my server is happily running for few month now!
Thanks guys for your help