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

[Josh More]

 I was also badly burned in my Red Hat / Fedora / Debian (though the
debian upgrade got to be OK, when they decided to stop releasing new
distributions (removes tongue from cheek)).

It seemed to me that I do so many quirky experimental things to my
systems, that it's unrealistic to expect the distributions to be able to
handle it.  What I do instead is:

1) Whenever I install something on my system that is not part of the
"core", I make a directory inside /root/installs, and put the original
tarball.
2) Once the item is installed, I use the 'history' command to generate
the list of steps that I used to install it.  This goes in
/root/installs/<app>/NOTES
3) If I add additional repositories, (rpmforge, packman, etc), the
instructions go in /root/installs/repos/NOTES
4) Periodically, I run 'rpm -qa | sort > /root/installs/rpms.txt'

Then, when it's time to upgrade, I back up /etc, /home, and /root, and
do a clean install.
That way, I have an easy reference for the strange stuff I may want to
do again, and a reference for what I used to have installed.  I've not
had an upgrade problem since I started doing things this way.

Now, that said, it does take some care to follow the basic rules:

1) EVERYTHING on the system must be linked to an rpm (or deb, etc etc
etc)
2) EVERY rpm (or deb, etc) installed on the system that did not come
from a yum (or yast, apt-get, red-carpet, etc) repo, must be in a
/root/installs/ directory
3) EVERY tarball installed on the system must first be packaged, and
the packaging notes be in a /root/installs/ directory.
 
But if you can do that, most problems magically vanish.  Also, it's
been interesting that as the third-party repos have matured, my
/root/installs directories have shrunk dramatically.





-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701


>>> David Champion <dchampion at visionary.com> 04/05/07 2:25 PM >>> 
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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