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

Thu Apr 5 14:45:28 CDT 2007

Yeah, that's why RedHat servers are such a pain to update, because you 
have to install so much extra stuff to make them useful.

Mandriva, for all it's other faults, has just about everything I need in 
  the installs, or one of the supplemental sources (contribs or PLF). 
It's been pretty rare that I have to install something from source.

-dc

Josh More wrote:
>  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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>>> Cialug at cialug.org
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>>>
>>>
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