emerge sync hangs machine

[samuel.penn]

I've been offline for the last few weeks, and finally got internet connection back this evening. One of the first things I try is "emerge sync".

It takes a long time, then the machine hangs. I think the last message was something to do with deleting hostap.

I reset the machine, and try again (thinking it was something else that had caused the hang). It hangs again, and this time I made a note of the last thing that the sync output:

deleting net-wireless/hostap/files/digest-hostap-0.0.3

Some stuff has synced, since some new upgrades to packages are now listed in my system and world lists, however I'm loath to do another "emerge sync" again until I have some idea of what might be causing it, or what to look out for.

I'm running kernel 2.4.24, portage 2.0.50-r6. I've got 0.5GB RAM so I don't think running out of memory is an issue, plus there's plenty of disc space. I've never had a hang on Gentoo previously (been running it on this machine for 6 months+).

System is a Pentium 3 933, I don't think it's overheating.

Is there a known issue with hostap? Other articles I've found seem to suggest overloading the machine being the issue, but it seems to have possibly hung twice on the same package.

[kallamej]

shouldn't be any problems with hostap. Have you tried emerge-webrsync? Could it be time for a fsck?
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[samuel.penn]

I fscked the /usr partition (ReiserFS), which brought up several errors. There was also an issue in root not having permission to list some of the directories in /usr/portage.

Not sure whether it was the hang (and hence hard reset) of emerge sync which broke the partition, or if the partition had been broken previosly and hence caused the hang, but now things seem to be working.