Ran into a problem updating packages on my Ubuntu-based NAS and Plex host; zfs-zed and zfsutils-linux were unconfigured due to some logic failures that occurred in certain configurations. This resulted in apt failures. In my case, there was an empty zpool configured in a subdir of another pool which resulted in the zfsutils-linux configuration script failing when it was run.

dpkg: error processing package zfsutils-linux (--configure):
 installed zfsutils-linux package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of zfs-zed:
 zfs-zed depends on zfsutils-linux (>= 0.8.3-1ubuntu12.14); however:
  Package zfsutils-linux is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing package zfs-zed (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
																										  
 Errors were encountered while processing:
     zfsutils-linux
	 zfs-zed
  E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

To resolve, I stopped all the services that might write to the zpool(s) - NFS and a Plex container, then

  • zfs unmount [root pool name] (replace [root pool name] with -a to unmount all pools if needed)
  • zfs list to list pools
  • zfs destroy [root pool name]/[sub pool] - Be really careful you’re destroying the right pool. Going back isn’t impossible, but it’s not easy.
  • zfs list to confirm the pool isn’t listed
  • zfs mount -a to mount all pools
  • dpkg --configure -a to complete the configuration of unconfigured packages
  • Restart stopped services
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