wierd / annoying rpm strangeness with nagios rpms (dag) via apt (or not)

[Dag Wieers]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Duncan Robertson wrote:

> I have been installing nagios (for access to the plugins, not the
> server) via apt with success, until recently when I started getting a
> strange error:
> 
> After unpacking 4601kB of additional disk space will be used.
> Executing RPM (-Uvh)...
> warning: /var/cache/apt/archives/nagios_1.1-5.dag.rh90_i386.rpm: V3 DSA
> signature: NOKEY, key ID 6b8d79e6
> Preparing...                ###########################################
> [100%]
> /etc/nagios/timeperiods.cfg.rpmnew
> 
> (... delete assorted errors...)
> 
> warning: /etc/rc.d/init.d/nagios saved as
> /etc/rc.d/init.d/nagios.rpmorig
> ########################################### [100%]
> error: rpmdbAdd: skipping h#     265 Header V3 DSA signature: BAD, key
> ID 6b8d79e6
> 
> after this the apt/rpm db thinks the package is not there, yet it is..
> this wrecks further usage of apt, and because the dependancies are
> messed up. I have tried rebuilding the db using rpm --rebuilddb, and 
> adding nagios rpm with rpm, and even rebuilding it from the source rpm
> in case the rpm is corrupted.
> 
> System is minimal redhat 9 install, then updated using apt from freshrpm
> and dag repositories. Same result on 2 servers in 2 locations.
> 
> I dont really need nagios, mainly it is part of the dependancy chain and
> having it do this damages the behaviour of apt.
> 
> my current workaround is to remove nagios-plugins before apt-getting, bu
> that is a crappy workaround.
> 
> I originally composed this email a few weeks ago, but shelved it, but there
> have been a few updates since then, but the problem still occurs.
> 
> any ideas?
> 
> error: rpmdbAdd: skipping h#     265 Header V3 DSA signature: BAD, key
> ID 6b8d79e6
> 
> 
> seems to be the key here, but it seems to be quite an obscure error.

I don't understand the error you're getting but the problem seem to be 
caused by the fact that the RPM requires the group apache to exist prior 
to installing while httpd is actually not necessary to run/use nagios.

A quick work-around for me was to require httpd (or apache) but since 
there are people using nagios without apache that may be not a very good 
solution.

To me it looks like a bug in rpm, especially the weird error you get, and 
I'm looking into an acceptable solution.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]