So I had an issue with apt-get the other night on the very server this site resides on that took me a while to work out. There were two packages (I want to say debianutils and passwd) that were both trying to install adduser (or useradd) and the debianutils kept erroring out. Well, this wouldn’t have been an issue, except I was attempting to do an apt-get dist-upgrade. I’ve had issues before with apt-get (it removed my kernel once and my host said the box would have to be reinstalled from scratch, but it was no match for my kung-foo) so I’m a little leery of it as it is (I’m a ./compile && make && make install kind of guy).

This time was no different. I couldn’t fathom why it wouldn’t just install one and then install the other. I had to find a way around it and luckily I was able to. Here’s what I did…


#dpkg-reconfigure base-files
#dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/debianutils_2.23.1_i386.deb
NOTE: You really shouldn’t FORCE dpkg or apt to do anything as it could really mess the system up yo!
# dpkg –configure -a
#apt-get dist-upgrade
#reboot


Of course, something else went wrong and removed all of my users (because I had them all set to the same UID so the system saw a problem in that there was really only one user and decided to fix it…) except root, which couldn’t login via ssh as I had disabled root login in sshd…. but that was easily fixed by my host (who have been superb lately…)

Any who, if you decide to try and mess up your system, do so at your own risk!