UPDATE Re: [Cialug] upgrading opensuse 10.1 -> 10.2

[David Champion]

Not exactly that one, but I've been burned before by various RedHat & 
Mandriva system updates.

I've had nearly identical systems where one update goes just fine, but 
another one fails. It's very frustrating. I've learned that any time I'm 
going to do an update, I backup, attempt the update... if it fails, then 
I just do a clean install and restore my backup. Probably better to get 
a clean install anyway.

Most recently, after doing a Mandriva update on a system running 
software RAID, the update script munged the mdadm.conf and left all the 
volumes off the DEVICE list. Needless to say, the system couldn't find 
the RAID when it rebooted. That was a joy to track down. And it was my 
personal server I co-lo with a really nice dude, so I had to bug him to 
get to the box when it failed.

Mandriva 2006 is just about to EOL, so I'm going to have another round 
of updates. :)

-dc

Matt Patterson wrote:
> Ah, the joys of system administration.
> 
> I found the general source of my issues with the upgrade and grub 
> problem. It was one of the grub files other than menu.lst.    I'm 
> guessing the stage1 or 2 files.
> 
> Here is how I fixed the issue.  I booted off the opensuse10.2 install Cd 
> into rescue mode.  Mounted the root partition and brought up an IP.  
>  From there I went to its matching sister server and grabbed everything 
> from /boot and /lib/modules since I was basically rolling back the 
> kernel at this point.  Once the files were in place on the mounted root 
> partition, I re-ran the grub setup commands, rebooted, prayed to the bit 
> gods and Eureka!  SUSE boots as expected.
> 
> I still have a snapshot of the bad boot directory and I am going to try 
> and see what was screwed up.  Needless to say, this is VERY annoying 
> that this has now happened twice on different hardware.
> 
> Has anyone else been bitten like this?
> 
> -Matt
> 
> 
> On Thu, 5 Apr 2007, Matt Patterson wrote:
> 
>> All,
>>
>> I'm starting to get that urge to kill again.  It's been one of those 
>> nights.
>>
>> I'm having an issue with the upgrade process from opensuse 10.1 to 
>> opensuse 10.2. Here is what I have done.  I have a local mirror of the 
>> opensuse repository and have set my boxes to look at the opensuse 
>> stable repository as described by the help section of the opensuse site.
>>
>> I have successfully gotten one box to go through the upgrade process 
>> getting the patches for 10.1, reboot for the new kernel and then 
>> getting the rest of the packages to update to 10.2.
>>
>> Last week, on matching hardware as the 1st successful update, opensuse 
>> failed to write out a proper menu.lst file for grub.  It put in the 
>> initrd line but left out the root and kernel lines which, based on 
>> past experience, are pretty important.
>>
>> So, I got around that issue and figured it was a fluke.  That is, 
>> until tonight happened.  Tonight's issue is happening on different 
>> hardware (IBM instead of Dell).  Instead of getting a screwed up 
>> menu.lst file, I get a 'Grub loading, please wait' line to flash 
>> across my screen before the system reboots.    I booted up a rescue 
>> CD, got into grub and did the normal root and setup command.  It 
>> states that everything went fine.  But I'm still in the reboot loop hell.
>>
>> With different hardware between the issues, I'm starting to think that 
>> there is a bug in suse.
>>
>> Any thoughts on how to get this box back and what I can do to avoid 
>> this issue in the future?  I'm going to try lilo in the morning and 
>> see if that will allow this thing to boot properly.
>>
>>
>> -Matt
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>>
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