hang during gnutls upgrade

[anonymoose]

hello all-

I have an issue which has come up today with one of my RPis. I ran a system upgrade with the standard

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'pacman -Syu')

and accepted the default settings at each query, total package updates were about 100Mb. Everything seemed to be proceeding fine until 97% completion of gnutls, at which point the RPi appears to have hung or shut down. I say appears to, because unfortunately the system is at a remote site and not immediately accessible so I cannot confirm what happened for perhaps a day or two; the system is definitely down and not responding to pings or SSH login.

So I need a plan of action for after the restart. Should I simply forget about keeping the system up to date for the time being, or can I skip gnutls specifically (will this actually prevent the issue from reoccurring?) or does anyone have any ideas as to troubleshooting the precise cause? Are there any known related issues?

My RPi is equipped with an 8Gb Kingston SD system disk, and a 32Gb Patriot USB disk, the Kingston SD should have over 5Gb free space so I can't imagine the system would have run out of disk space. I know the Linux basics, but troubleshooting an issue like this from scratch is beyond me. Any recommendations?