[ale] Help - DEB Pkg Hell

[JD]

This morning I was performing weekly system maintenance on a few
machines and ran into an issue.  Honestly, the problem began with just a
single box a few weeks ago, but now it has grown to 4 systems.  These
servers are all patched weekly since installation. There were no other
unresolved known issues prior to this problem.  Google hasn't helped or
perhaps I'm just denser at 5am on a Saturday morning?

These are a mix of Ubuntu Server x64 8.04 and 10.04 machines.

Here's the issue on 1 of them:

-------------------------
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  linux-headers-server: Depends: linux-headers-2.6.32-31-server but it
is not installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.


-------------------------
So, I follow those instructions ... here's what happened:

$ sudo apt-get -f install

Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer
required:
  linux-headers-2.6.32-27-server linux-headers-2.6.32-28-server
  linux-headers-2.6.32-27 linux-headers-2.6.32-28 linux-headers-2.6.32-29
  linux-headers-2.6.32-29-server
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  linux-headers-2.6.32-31 linux-headers-2.6.32-31-server
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  linux-headers-2.6.32-31 linux-headers-2.6.32-31-server
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 46 not upgraded.
4 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B/10.7MB of archives.
After this operation, 85.5MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? (Reading database ... ^M(Reading database
... 5%^M(Reading database ... 10%^M(Reading database ... 15%^M(Reading
database ... 20%^M(Reading database ... 25%^M(Reading database ...
30%^M(Reading database ... 35%^M(Reading database ... 40%^M(Reading
database ... 45%^M(Reading database ... 50%^M(Reading database ...
55%^M(Reading database ... 60%^M(Reading database ... 65%^M(Reading
database ... 70%^M(Reading database ... 75%^M(Reading database ...
80%^M(Reading database ... 85%^M(Reading database ... 90%^M(Reading
database ... 95%^M(Reading database ... 100%^M(Reading database ...
115507 files and directories currently installed.)^M
Unpacking linux-headers-2.6.32-31 (from
.../linux-headers-2.6.32-31_2.6.32-31.61_all.deb) ...^M
dpkg: error processing
/var/cache/apt/archives/linux-headers-2.6.32-31_2.6.32-31.61_all.deb
(--unpack):^M
 unable to create
`/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-31/arch/m68k/include/asm/raw_io.h.dpkg-new'
(while processing
`./usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-31/arch/m68k/include/asm/raw_io.h'): No
space left on device^M
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)^M
Unpacking linux-headers-2.6.32-31-server (from
.../linux-headers-2.6.32-31-server_2.6.32-31.61_amd64.deb) ...^M
dpkg: error processing
/var/cache/apt/archives/linux-headers-2.6.32-31-server_2.6.32-31.61_amd64.deb
(--unpack):^M
 error creating directory
`./usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-31-server/include/config/mac80211': No
space left on device^M
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)^M
Errors were encountered while processing:^M
 /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-headers-2.6.32-31_2.6.32-31.61_all.deb^M
 /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-headers-2.6.32-31-server_2.6.32-31.61_amd64.deb^M


-------------------------
It claims there is no space left on the device ... there is over 1G free.

$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              3890452   2607088   1085732  71% /
none                    753044       160    752884   1% /dev
none                    757480         0    757480   0% /dev/shm
none                    757480        40    757440   1% /var/run
none                    757480         0    757480   0% /var/lock
none                    757480         0    757480   0% /lib/init/rw

-------------------------

I did an autoclean and autoremove already to
- wipe the package cache
- force new downloads and
- clean up space, if that was causing the issue.

Most of the other systems have a different error, usually something like
this, but in the postfix module:

# apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  dhcp3-client dhcp3-common libapache2-mod-php5 libperl5.8 libpq-dev libpq5
  perl perl-base perl-modules php-pear php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-curl
  php5-dev php5-gd php5-mhash php5-mysql php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp
  php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl postfix tzdata
27 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/16.1MB of archives.
After this operation, 12.3kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Use of uninitialized value in substitution (s///) at
/usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Format/822.pm line 65, <$__ANONIO__> line 1.
Use of uninitialized value in hash element at
/usr/share/perl5/Debconf/DbDriver/File.pm line 70, <$__ANONIO__> chunk 1.
Preconfiguring packages ...
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)


I'm uncomfortable editing pre/post install scripts, not because I can't,
but it just seems WRONG.  Fortunately, this server doesn't run DHCP,
php, or apache.  Those were installed due to some automatic dependency
thing, I guess.  It runs a ruby blog server, ruby cluster management and
perl-based reverse proxy/load balancer.


Anyone have any ideas?  I've googled and tried a few of those
suggestions, but nothing has worked.