[Cialug] Suse upgrades and grub issues

[Josh More]

I've never experienced this particular problem on any of the SUSE
servers we have.
I *have*, however, experienced something similar on a laptop.

1) Are you using /boot/ directory or a partition?  SUSE prefers
dedicated /boot/ partitions.

2) If the /boot/ partition fills up, SUSE can have interesting failure
states.

I was able to fix the laptop problem by using LILO, though it should
also have been fixable by changing how GRUB was installed.  The problem
in that case was the kernel having the driver for the hard drives, but
initrd not knowing about it.  You might also be able to fix these by
rolling your own initrd.

 
 

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



>>> Matt Patterson <matt at usrlocal.com> 07/24/08 10:58 AM >>> 
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
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