Installation of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) updates may fail in some cases

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

Installation of applicable updates may sometimes fail on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) devices.

Cause

The list of updates sent down to zypper install command would break existing RPM dependencies and user interaction is required to provide the choice (among the choices that zypper suggests) of how these dependencies can be violated for the installation to proceed.

For more details see the --force-resolution switch of the zypper install command.

Resolution

To make sure that you are not including such updates in the software update policy, run the following shell command on your SLES client:

ZYPP_CONF='/opt/altiris/notification/swuagent/var/repo/smf-yum-repository.conf' /usr/bin/zypper list-updates | grep <name_of_the_RPM_being_installed>

If the output does not show the package and Patch Management Solution reports it as applicable then most probably such package will fail during the installation.

Note that Patch Management Solution does not provide capabilities to install such updates.

If you want to install these updates on your Linux devices, you must do it manually using the zypper command line.

Additional Information

In IT Management Suite 8.6, extra logging has been added.

Search for “Failed to process Yum transaction.” in the NS agent logs and it will explain the failure reason.

Example of the logs: