Fedora/CentOS error: wireguard-dkms-1:0.0.20180420-1.fc28.noarch: erase failed

[Joe Doss]

One of my coworkers stumbled on this error this morning where the 
WireGuard DKMS module would get removed by a kernel update and leave the 
wireguard-dkms-0.0.20180420-1.fc28.noarch RPM hanging out where it 
couldn't uninstall correctly. You will see this error on a dnf/yum update:

Failed:
   wireguard-dkms.noarch 1:0.0.20180513-1.fc28

You can verify the issue with this command:

# rpm -qa |grep wireguard-dkms
wireguard-dkms-0.0.20180513-1.fc28.noarch
wireguard-dkms-0.0.20180420-1.fc28.noarch

You will see the old snapshot RPM won't manually be removed like this:

# rpm -e wireguard-dkms-0.0.20180420-1.fc28.noarch
error: %preun(wireguard-dkms-1:0.0.20180420-1.fc28.noarch) scriptlet 
failed, exit status 3
error: wireguard-dkms-1:0.0.20180420-1.fc28.noarch: erase failed

You can fix this easily with:

# dkms install -m wireguard -v 0.0.20180420

Verify it is installed:

# dkms status
wireguard, 0.0.20180420, 4.16.6-302.fc28.x86_64, x86_64: installed 
(WARNING! Diff between built and installed module!)
wireguard, 0.0.20180513, 4.16.6-302.fc28.x86_64, x86_64: built
wireguard, 0.0.20180513, 4.16.7-300.fc28.x86_64, x86_64: installed

Manually remove the old snapshot RPM:

# rpm -e wireguard-dkms-0.0.20180420-1.fc28.noarch

Verify that it is uninstalled:

# rpm -qa |grep wireguard-dkms
wireguard-dkms-0.0.20180513-1.fc28.noarch

This issue seems to be a pretty rare edge case, and the fix is easy. I 
will try and improve the RPM so this can't happen in the future. Any 
ideas from the list on how to prevent this edge case are welcome.

Joe




-- 
Joe Doss
joe at solidadmin.com