Alan Schwartz: >> Sorry to hear you had issues with the upgrade. >> >> The problem you describe appears to be related to the release notes item >> [5.3.2] (5.3.2.1 actually, but I cannot find the direct link to that). >> The exact case with /var/lib/dpkg/status is not mentioned, but it could >> be that there are some permissions on your system that forbit "_apt" to >> access /var/lib/dpkg/status. >> >> * Could you please try to login in as the _apt user and check that it >> can read /var/lib/dpkg/status? > > Due to the /nonexistent home directory and /bin/false login shell, > it does not appear to be possible to log in as _apt: > > [...]
For future reference, you can "by-pass" that by using: su -s/bin/bash _apt That will grant you a shell as _apt provided it is run as root (regardless of _apt's login shell and $HOME). > _apt$ apt-get check > E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission > denied) > E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you > root? > FTR; I don't think that "apt-get check" is supposed to work as non-root. >> - If it fails, please attempt to figure out where the permission >> fails (e.g. [dir-test]) > > # ls -ld / /var /var/lib /var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg/status > drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 1024 Jul 10 11:21 / > drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 4096 May 7 2013 /var > drwxr-xr-x 74 root root 4096 Jul 7 16:01 /var/lib > drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4096 Jul 11 08:48 /var/lib/dpkg > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1961225 Jul 11 08:48 /var/lib/dpkg/status > > As you can see, none of these are writable by _apt; however, these are > the same permissions I see on the other (working) Indeed, and _apt does not need write access to the status file. Does it work if you disable the sandbox user, e.g. by using: apt-get -o APT::Sandbox::User=root update Thanks, ~Niels
