/etc/cron.daily/apt: Cache has broken packages, exiting

[Carlo Gandolfo]

Binary package hint: apt

After I "apt-get update" I always receive the message "È presente nuova mail in /var/mail/root" (new message in /var/mail/root)

Doing "cat /var/mail/root" I see the following message.

From: Anacron <root@vega>
To: root@vega
Subject: Anacron job 'cron.daily' on vega
Message-Id: <20091025012043.7E13822218@vega>
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:20:43 +0100 (CET)

/etc/cron.daily/apt:
Cache has broken packages, exiting

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Nov 13 17:01:06 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: apt 0.7.23.1ubuntu2 [modified: usr/bin/apt-cache usr/bin/apt-cdrom usr/bin/apt-config usr/bin/apt-get usr/lib/apt/methods/bzip2 usr/lib/apt/methods/cdrom usr/lib/apt/methods/copy usr/lib/apt/methods/file usr/lib/apt/methods/ftp usr/lib/apt/methods/gpgv usr/lib/apt/methods/gzip usr/lib/apt/methods/http usr/lib/apt/methods/lzma usr/lib/apt/methods/mirror usr/lib/apt/methods/rred usr/lib/apt/methods/rsh usr/lib/apt/methods/ssh usr/lib/libapt-pkg-libc6.10-6.so.4.8.1]
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=it_IT.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-15.50-generic
SourcePackage: apt
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-15-generic x86_64

[Torsten Spindler (tspindler)]

I recommend you clean your apt cache with
$ sudo apt-get clean
This will remove the broken packages. For reading the mail use a mail user agent, like mutt or mailx. See http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/ for further reading.

[Matt Kimmel (matt-infinite-jest)]

This is also happening to me since I upgraded my server to Ubuntu 9.10 x86 using do-release-upgrade. Running "sudo apt-get clean" does not fix it.

[Catalin Patulea (cpatulea)]

Happening here too on Ubuntu 9.10. Ran "apt-get clean", and error popped up the next time the /etc/cron.daily/apt job ran.

[Jarno Antikainen (jarno-antikainen)]

Here too, on Ubuntu 10.04. With unattended upgrades the error keeps coming back when the cron job runs.

[Jarno Antikainen (jarno-antikainen)]

I believe I know why this was happening. When I did aptitude safe-upgrade manually there was a package (grub) that asked for a question interactively. I guess that was the broken package that the cron job complained about.

[Paul Tötterman (ptman)]

I solved this problem in the following way:

My root file system (ext4 which contained both /var and /usr) was low on inodes, but not free space, so monitoring didn't complain. You can check this by running `df -i` (as opposed to `df -h` which shows free space in human readable format).

To fix the low inode count I removed old linux-kernel-* and linux-headers-* packages. After that everything started working.

This means, at least for me, it was NOT A BUG, but the error message could be improved. Or maybe motd could warn about low inodes in addition to low space. Btrfs allocates inodes dynamically and doesn't suffer from this same problem.

[in8sworld (n8berry)]

I got this error emailed on a cron job. Turned out that my /boot partition was 100% "in use" with old kernel packages (as in #7 above). Deleting some of the older packages solved my problem.