Hi!

While I found a lot of threads talking about problems with the update to PR1.2 I see different behavior on my side: I don't get any error message but the download of the actual update apparently seems to hang forever.

But let me start from the beginning: When I initially got the notification that an update is available I confirmed that I want to install it. After clicking through all the messages it told me that I should make a backup. I did. After that I tried to continue but the phone told me that the battery is too low for the update and I should recharge. Ok, I did that. At that point I already noticed that the notification in the status bar had already disappeared despite the fact that the update was not yet installed.

Anyway I just opened the application manager manually and selected "Update". When I do that it starts "Checking for updates". After some time the relevant update "Maemo 5 10.2010.19-1" appears in the background but the "Checking for updates" still goes on for infinite time stopping with the progress bar at about 50%. Anyway I could interrupt this by clicking stop and still seeing the relevant update.

Next step I started that update again, confirmed that I want to install it and that I made a backup and thus want to continue.

After some time I get "Downloading 113,1 MB" where the phone sits forever. I waited for several hours but within that time there was no progress at all (not even one pixel row of progress bar visible).

Does anyone have an idea what the problem might be in that case or how I could debug the situation to investigate the cause myself? Optimally someone would even have a solution already.

I know that I could just flash the whole rootfs from my computer but my understanding is that this would reset everything I customized thus I hope someone has a better solution here.

Is there some log file I could gather information from? The updater definitely should have something like that because otherwise you are just stuck when something is messed up and from what I read in this forum this still seems to be a common situation for upgrades on the N900, although the upgrade to PR1.1 went perfectly smoothly for myself back then.

Greetings,
Robert

Backup with backup app
Copy backup to computer
Flash everything
Copy backup back to n900
restore

Well, as I said in my initial post, for sure I could do that but if this really is the final answer in the Maemo world to diagnose and fix problems then the platform will fail for usability issues before it really started to become successful in the market.

I am willing to help to diagnose the problem on my phone so that this behavior could be fixed in future releases if someone with insight into the product points me to a place where to look for potential problems.

If we just go down the path like many people do on Windows issues to just always advice to "reboot the machine and hope the best" then we will never get real bugs fixed and those bugs will accumulate more and more.

My goal is not to have PR1.2 installed right _now_ but to get to a platform I can trust in because it gets more and more mature because bugs get fixed over time. I am not interested in a mobile phone I have to reflash two times a month and reboot five times a day just to work around hundreds of bugs.

I hope some Nokia engineer (or someone else with enough experience on the platform) could give me some starting information where to look into the problem. I am able to use the typical Linux system and debugging tools when someone tells me what potential issues to look for.

Robert

My OTA upgrade went smoothly

You could try off/on cycle, and then check that you filesystems are not full (df -h on X terminal).

Thanks,

I did try to restart the phone already with no effect.

None of my filesystems is full (or close enough).

What I managed in between is to monitor some behavior during this hang in the download process:

Zero-byte files for all packages are created in /home/user/MyDocs/.apt-archive-cache/partial/. --- They stay zero bytes for all their lifetime and are deleted right before the next one is created so that always only one file is present. Thus it seems the download process itself is failing somehow.

The tool that is actually doing that is "/usr/lib/apt/methods/https" invoked by "/usr/libexec/apt-worker backend /tmp/apt-worker.to /tmp/apt-worker.from /tmp/apt-worker.status /tmp/apt-worker.cancel BM".

Thus what is the expected behavior of that tool? Where are those files supposed to be stored when they are completely downloaded? Is there a way to get potential error messages out of this tool or the apt-worker process?

Robert

Zero-byte files doesn't sound good.

As a normal user in the .apt-archive-cache directory with X terminal:

cat /etc/services > foo
ls -la /etc/services foo

should show that both files are equal in the size.

If they are not. Then the file system if full or corrupted.

That's not the cause of the problem. I can still create files (even large ones) successfully, including in that specific directory.

Probably I have to go the path and build a strace binary to monitor what this strange https process is actually doing...

Robert

I did that now and found the following:

The process in question tries to resolve downloads.maemo.nokia.com from the DNS server running on localhost (i.e. the phone itself). Those requests time out.

When trying to do the same from the console of the phone with "host downloads.maemo.nokia.com localhost" it works perfectly fine though.

This seems really weired. Anyone with an idea what the cause could be for that?

Found the cause for that. It was a broken DNS implementation in the WLAN router the phone forwarded the DNS queries to. I could work around that problem by manually editing /etc/resolv.conf on the phone and putting a public DNS server in the net in there.

Currently the phone is updating. Thus let's hope the best...