bind 9 fails to update

[Tom H]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 9:19 AM, robert <robert at redcor.ch> wrote:
>
> I am running Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS.
> Now when I try to upgrade I get the following error:
> Setting up bind9 (1:9.9.5.dfsg-3ubuntu0.8) ...
> locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
> * Starting domain name service... bind9 [fail]
> invoke-rc.d: initscript bind9, action "start" failed.
> dpkg: error processing package bind9 (--configure):
> subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
> Errors were encountered while processing:
> bind9
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
>
> what I did try is to uninstall bind9 and to reinstall it.
>
> How can I fix this error?

I've had locale problems from time to time on Ubuntu and Debian (but
usually via perl or python) in spite of having "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" (or
"en_US.utf8") in "/etc/environment" or "/etc/default/locale".

When I've had this problem, I've deleted and re-created my locale.

On a 16.04 VM:

/usr/lib/locale# locale
LANG=en_US.utf8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.utf8"
LC_TIME="en_US.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="C.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.utf8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.utf8"
LC_NAME="en_US.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.utf8"
LC_ALL=

/usr/lib/locale# locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
POSIX
en_US.utf8

/usr/lib/locale# ls
C.UTF-8/  locale-archive

/usr/lib/locale# localedef --list-archive
en_US.utf8

/usr/lib/locale# rm locale-archive
[You could "mv" out of the way in order to be able to restore it
should you want/need to]

/usr/lib/locale# localedef --list-archive

/usr/lib/locale# locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
POSIX

/usr/lib/locale# localedef -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

/usr/lib/locale# locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
POSIX
en_US.utf8

[I don't know why it's en_US.utf8 rather than en_US.UTF-8. This wasn't
the case in the past. Perhaps it's an upstream-inherited RH-ism
because locales are suffixed with utf8 in RHEL and Fedora, and RH
leads glibc development.]

/usr/lib/locale# localedef --list-archive
en_US.utf8