[Cialug] Suse upgrades and grub issues

[Matt Patterson]

Ok,

I'm not sure how many people run SuSE on here but I seem to have a 
recurring issue that is really starting to irk me.

We only have a few SLES servers and a bunch of opensuse servers and I see 
the issue on both platforms.  Which makes sense as one is based off the 
other.

The issue happens when installing the kernel patches.  I 
would say that I have a 90% failure rate with this.  Not with the 
installation of the kernel itself, but the grub updates that happen in 
relation to the kernel updates.  I have had issues where the menu.lst 
file is corrupted or the bigger, more popular error is that the stage2 
file becomes corrupt and when the server reboots, it will go into a 
reboot loop.

I've opened a ticket before with Novell for one of the SLES servers and 
provided a b0rked stage2 file for them to look at.  Nothing 
really ever came out of this incident since I was able to get the system 
up on my own.  For the most part, I have been able to restore the servers 
by booting a CD in rescue mode and untar a backup of the /boot directory 
and everything is fine in the world.  But this is rather annoying when 
you are trying to patch servers that are hundreds of miles away.

So the question is...am I alone with these issues?  I'm not running 
anything out of the ordinary as far as I can tell.  IBM x3550 servers for 
the most part, and a variety of opensuse 10.1, opensuse 10.2 and SLES 10 
sp1.

Anyone have any ideas here?   I'm honestly thinking about removing grub 
from all the servers and installing lilo and hoping that it resolves this 
issue.  Though I think that the real underlying issue is just that YaST is 
not handling an error condition correctly and moving on like nothing has 
happened.

  -Matt