Error – J.Lo's Tech Blog

dpkg: error processing package libc6:amd64 (–configure):

A nice easy one for 2am 🙁 but it took me hours to work out (and it really shouldn’t have).

Trying to update servers using apt-get upgrade. It listed about 6 packages to be upgraded, but kept throwing an error:

Setting up libc6:amd64 (2.23-0ubuntu4) ...
sh: echo: I/O error
sh: echo: I/O error
dpkg: error processing package libc6:amd64 (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
libc6:amd64
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I spent a good few hours searching google and trying to work out what had been installed that could be causing an issue with libc6. Though I was fairly certain nothing had been (only because this is 2 days after a migration to new servers, and I’m hitting this problem on 2/4 servers, but they have extremely similar setups).

By chance I noticed:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 489M 0 489M 0% /dev
tmpfs 100M 100M 0 100% /run
/dev/vda1 30G 16G 13G 55% /
tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 497M 0 497M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user/1000

I’ll give you a clue “look at /run” 🙁

Something is eating all the space. So I tried to run ncdu to look for large files (I know there’s other ways, but I like ncdu). But I hadn’t installed it on this new server and I can’t install it with apt-get broken.

Thinking /run is bound to be causing some issues (still not sure if it’s causing this particular issue), I reboot the server (bad move!). It locked up and had to be power cycled. Thankfully it’s a droplet and with DigitalOcean I can power cycle easily (I did try the console but it wouldn’t connect).

Anyway after a reboot, /run started at 5% used, but quickly grew to 70%. but I did managed to install ncdu, and with that I knew the problems I had with apt-get were being caused by a full /run.

After a quick (very quick) look at ncdu /run I could see hhvm.hhbc taking up approx 85Mb+

A quick check of the config and I can see hhvm is configured to do so. So I adjusted the config to put it in /var/cache/hhvm/hhvm.hhbc instead and update the systemd service script to create /var/cache/hhvm and set it’s owner.

Another reboot, everything seems fine and /run is now at 3% used.

And I’ve run apt-get upgrade successfully.

I’m thankful that I noticed, I really thought I’d screwed something on these 2 servers while migrating, and I could see another night of rebuilding new servers ahead of me.

Morale of the story: Check your not out of space when you get weird errors (yes the I/O should have rang some bells, but hey it is 2am).

WooCommerce API: No order data specified to edit order

Yesterday I received my Barcode scanner, after a little playing scanning everything in sight I got to work on programming a Raspberry PI in Python to use the barcode scanner to update orders in WooCommerce.

I’m not going to go into full details in this post on how. but I will write it up soon.

A BIG problem I hit though was updating orders using the WooCommerce API. I kept getting error code 400 ‘No order data specified to edit order’. I’d followed the example but changed it to fit my code i.e dont print the output but return it for error checking.

Searching google for that exact phrase gave just 1 result, and it’s someone commenting they are getting the error with no response (and it’s 4 months old on a 2 year old post).

After looking through the API code and trying to follow along (I’m not the best programmer but I can generally follow what it’s trying). I found it looking for ‘order’

So after looking at how the bulk update is done and with a bit of playing I found that instead of

data = {'status': 'completed'}

you need

data = {"order":{"status":"completed"}}

Hey Presto it works. My specific code is now

def WooCommerceUpdateOrder(order, data):
   global wcapi
   putstring = "orders/%s" % order
   result = wcapi.put(putstring, data)
   return result

which is called using

data = { 'order': { "status": "completed" } }
updateresult = WooCommerceUpdateOrder(order, data)

Hope this helps someone. I’ll post the full python program for the barcode reader later in the week. Basically it uses a PI, PI LCD Screen with 4 buttons, Barcode Reader, Speakers. 🙂

Error ‘glibc detected *** /usr/bin/python: double free or corruption (fasttop)’ on Raspberry Pi using Python

Just a very quick post.
I’m working on a small project I’ve had in mind for a few months, basically pull and image and display it on the tv (there’s more to it, or I’d just settle for RasBMC).

So I’ve been coding it all up using python with pygame to display the image, all fine.

Then I introduced loops to refresh the images, and update the display. I had issues around other code and couldn’t keep looking at the tv while the code was running so I introduced a few mp3’s to play as the images were being refreshed and as the display was updating. All worked well, it sounded like I was on the Enterprise.

Further into coding up different functions, and some more headaches I’d cleared up alot of the minor error’s I had been getting, and was now ready to push the system to speed up the refreshes.

I’d managed to put a few images to refresh every second, and it appeared to be going well.
Then it stopped making a sound, checked and python had crashed with error:
glibc detected *** /usr/bin/python: double free or corruption (fasttop)

So I changed the code I’d been working on (clearly that’s the problem, didn’t have this earlier), but nope didn’t solve it.
Onto google, but this brought up alot of big reports about other things. checked a few, made a few changes. but I’m still getting the problem. Troubling though, if this is going to come down to the fact I’m refreshing alot and it’s getting intensive, it’s going to be a show stopper for this project.

Thankfully I did a little more searching and came across
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36878&p=308220

Now I dont have the same problem (playing wav’s) but this drew me to the fact I’m playing mp3’s and these have increased in how much I’m playing them and they now overlap alot more than earlier.

So I decided to drop them out. Eureka it’s been running about 15 minutes and not died (previously a few minutes), sad thing is I’m now kinda missing my beeps.
I had hoped to be able to play an alert sound, if certain events happened so I may have to rethink how I can do so without causing crashes.

Anyways there it is in case it’s of help to someone else. I’ll be posting about the project at a later date, once I’ve done a little more with the code and tested it a bit more. It’s my first serious attempt in python, I can make programmers cry at the best of times so I’m expecting people to be able to rip this apart (but I’m actually very interested in getting it stable, so will welcome the criticism/ideas.