I did a fresh install of FC4 on an x86_64 system (Tyan S2892 motherboard, 2G RAM, 3ware RAID controller). The install went fine. After a reboot, I logged in, did an su, then "yum update". It downloaded all the packages, installed a bunch of them, then hung. Killing the yum yielded a system that was broken in mysterious ways. Did another fresh install, then yum update. Same thing happened. Poked at it some more, found that it was hanging in an invocation of useradd. Tried doing an install of FC4 x86_64 inside a VMware 5.5 beta virtual machine on an FC4 system at home. Install went fine, yum update failed in the same way. Sometimes when it fails there is an /etc/passwd.LOCK or some such, but sometimes not. On the most recent attempt, there is an /etc/.pwd.lock At first I thought maybe one of these lock files was getting left over, and it was waiting to acquire the lock. But deleting the lock file doesn't get it going again, so I don't think that's the problem. Furthermore, I can't kill or even "kill -9" the useradd process; even after "kill -9" it's still hanging around in "D+" state (whatever that is): [root@localhost etc]# ps -C useradd -f UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD root 25933 25931 0 00:46 pts/1 00:00:00 /usr/sbin/useradd -c Network Crash Dump user -r -u 34 -g netdump -s /bin/bash -r -d /var/crash netdump [root@localhost etc]# I assume that useradd is being invoked as part of an RPM postinstall script (or maybe preinstall). The netdump user already exists before the yum update. The last time I did this it hung in useradd for a different user, presumably as part of the installation of a different package. This seems *very* reporoducible, and not specific to the configuration of the first machine I encountered the problem on. Any bright ideas as to why useradd might be getting stuck? Thanks, Eric
