aptd crashed with UnicodeDecodeError in _emit_acquire_item(): 'utf-8' codec can't decode bytes in position 0-1: invalid continuation byte

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I did not have to do an upgrade and reboot to hit this. It seems that my unity session crashed out and took me back the login prompt (so almost a restart). After that I did a ls -l on /var/crash to see if there was a new report. There was so I went to the launcher things and searched for 'up' which gave me a link to Software Updater, as I wanted. I started the updater so that it would see the crash report and start the bug report filing. It spotted the changes, opened a second window from which I could report the bug. I left that window alone while I waited for the main Software Updater window to finish checking for updates. While that was going I opened Chrome and let it restore its session so that I would be ready when a bug window opened. Once Chrome was sorted and all the updates were found I clicked send bug report, which then seemed to fail and then took me to this bug.

I had apparently his this twice today. Are there any further diagnostic steps that I can take take to assist in identifying the root cause?

Hit this again just now. Apparently it is quite repeatable on my system at current. I was typing in a terminal when the GUI locked up. After the reboot I fired up Software Updater and it went through a little report cycle that brought me here.

I can see the following crash files
/var/crash$ ll
total 112620
drwxrwsrwt 2 root whoopsie 4096 Sep 9 13:52 ./
drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4096 Jul 13 16:08 ../
-rw-rw---- 1 root whoopsie 0 Sep 9 13:51 .lock
-rw-r----- 1 thomasthorne whoopsie 28933552 Sep 9 13:52 _usr_bin_compiz.1000.crash
-rw-r----- 1 thomasthorne whoopsie 9080665 Sep 9 13:52 _usr_bin_pidgin.1000.crash
-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomasthorne whoopsie 0 Sep 2 10:12 _usr_bin_pidgin.1000.upload
-rw------- 1 whoopsie whoopsie 0 Sep 2 10:12 _usr_bin_pidgin.1000.uploaded
-rw-r----- 1 thomasthorne whoopsie 4810182 Sep 9 13:52 _usr_bin_python2.7.1000.crash
-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomasthorne whoopsie 0 Sep 7 16:50 _usr_bin_python2.7.1000.upload
-rw------- 1 whoopsie whoopsie 0 Sep 7 16:50 _usr_bin_python2.7.1000.uploaded
-rw-r----- 1 thomasthorne whoopsie 70072908 Sep 9 13:53 _usr_bin_skype.1000.crash
-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomasthorne whoopsie 0 Sep 7 17:03 _usr_bin_skype.1000.upload
-rw------- 1 whoopsie whoopsie 0 Sep 7 17:03 _usr_bin_skype.1000.uploaded
-rw-r----- 1 thomasthorne whoopsie 2302186 Sep 9 13:51 _usr_lib_unity-settings-daemon_unity-settings-daemon.1000.crash
-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomasthorne whoopsie 0 Sep 7 17:03 _usr_lib_unity-settings-daemon_unity-settings-daemon.1000.upload
-rw------- 1 whoopsie whoopsie 0 Sep 7 17:03 _usr_lib_unity-settings-daemon_unity-settings-daemon.1000.uploaded
-rw-r----- 1 root whoopsie 102800 Sep 8 13:40 _usr_sbin_aptd.0.crash
-rw-r--r-- 1 root whoopsie 0 Sep 8 13:40 _usr_sbin_aptd.0.upload
-rw------- 1 whoopsie whoopsie 0 Sep 8 13:40 _usr_sbin_aptd.0.uploaded

Looks like a similar set to earlier in the week.

Noting that I hit this again today. I wonder what is up with my system that am seeing this every month or so. I have already run RAM tests recently without anything being flagged up over a weekend. Maybe I have an odd package installed or something corrupted on my HDD. The SMART attributes all look OK and the drive is less than a year old, I will see if I can do some kind of integrity scan all the same just in case.

Again today. That is ~1 month after the last instance.

Today I was trying to install debug packages for Choqok as that asserted yesterday and was trying to form a report.

Thomas,

Don't worry anymore.
Somebody else could get my computer working again.

Mark this case as finnished.

Thanks for all your people's help.

I do appreciate it.

Regards,
Eddie

On 19/01/2016 10:52, Thomas A. F. Thorne wrote:
> Again today. That is ~1 month after the last instance.
>
> Today I was trying to install debug packages for Choqok as that asserted
> yesterday and was trying to form a report.
>

Hi Eddie,
I now have this problem on my own computer. If you are able to communicate a solution or work around for this issue I would be grateful.
Regards, Thomas

Hi Thomas,

What the person had done, I don't know.
Maybe it was luck.
I will contact him and find out for you.

Regards,
Eddie

On 19/01/2016 13:44, Thomas A. F. Thorne wrote:
> Hi Eddie,
> I now have this problem on my own computer. If you are able to communicate a solution or work around for this issue I would be grateful.
> Regards, Thomas
>

It has been a while since I have ended up back here. I was not installing any packages this time as far as I was aware. I performed a package upgrade via the GUI earlier in the morning. The error box came up while I was posting: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/samba/+bug/1575056