[TriLUG] Question: RH7.2 kernel update problem via RedHatNet/up2date?

William W. Ward wwward at pobox.com
Mon Aug 5 10:33:26 EDT 2002


Hi Tom,

Checked both issues.  I manually ran (as a safety) mkinitrd -f ....  with
the new kernel version set, and it does exist in /boot.  Other than the SCSI
card and one other item I don't recall which are already in modules.conf, I
added my ISA NIC for eth0.  All of these items come from the default install
of RH7.2, I've added nothing to the machine.

Based on my observations, the problem must be related to something crashing
or exiting abnormally in the process of module loads.  It doesn't seem to be
able to see the disk, so i'd say the SCSI module is bad in some way.

Question - is there a kernel startup parameter I can pass that will echo the
screen to a serial port or other device (FDD?) that I could use to capture
the entire boot sequence so I can parse through it for errors?  It scrolls
too quickly and cannot be back-scrolled once the kernel panic occurs, and no
entries are written to anything in /var/log so I can't go back there for it.

?

Thanks for the help,
Bill

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom 'spot' Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com>
To: <trilug at trilug.org>
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 9:14 AM
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Question: RH7.2 kernel update problem via
RedHatNet/up2date?


> On Sun, 2002-08-04 at 14:24, William W. Ward wrote:
> > This is true, it does install the new kernel and give you a backup to
work
> > from if it FUBARs.  However, it failed to fail in this case.
> >
> > Scoping out Usenet courtesy Google's groups archive, and speaking
briefly
> > with Tanner about the failure, it appears that the modules aren't
loading up
> > under the new kernel.  As best I can tell, modules are distributed with
the
> > kernel RPM, but in this circumstance, they're not being loaded at boot.
> > Earlier Kevin mentioned something about using mkinitrd, which I'll focus
on
> > again now, but it didn't solve the problem in the first case, before I
> > reloaded the OS from scratch.
> >
> > This is of interest to me to solve, as I have TWO MORE of these same
> > machines, identical to the unit I'm working on here.  I'd like to be
able to
> > load and update RH on them all. What I figure out on this box will take
care
> > of the others.
>
> Couple of things to check:
>
> 1. Make sure you're specifying modules in /etc/modules.conf. This is
> important, because the kernel %post install scripting is calling
> mkinitrd, which looks in /etc/modules.conf to see if it needs to
> generate an initrd image or not.
>
> 2. If your /etc/modules.conf is correct, see if an
> initrd-$KERNELVERSION.img exists in /boot. Check to see if its specified
> in the kernel image section for /etc/lilo.conf or /boot/grub/grub.conf.
>
> The Red Hat kernel RPMs definitely include modules, and I've done kernel
> 'upgrades' via RHN on 7.2 with no issue for quite some time now.
>
> ~spot
> ---
> Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> Red Hat Sales Engineer
> Sair Linux and GNU Certified Administrator (LCA)
> Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
> GPG: D786 8B22 D9DB 1F8B 4AB7  448E 3C5E 99AD 9305 4260
>
> The words and opinions reflected in this message do not necessarily
> reflect those of my employer, Red Hat, and belong solely to me.
>
> "Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal." --- T. S. Eliot
>
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