On Sun, 10 Mar 2013 11:04:37 -0600 Frank Cox wrote:
It may be easier to restore from backup and then attempt to do the update again.
Perhaps, but since everything seems to still be in place on those hard drives, and since my last "yum update" completed without any errors being reported, I suspect (hope?) that everything is still ok with the exception of whatever is causing the machines to fail to boot.
It's looking more and more like a full nuke-and-pave is going to be the answer here.
As I suspected, initramfs-2.6.32-358.0.1 was missing in /boot. Unfortunately, none of the other installed kernels boot either -- everything gives me a kernel panic.
I did a yum remove kernel-2.6.32-358.0.1 and yum install kernel-2.6.32-358.0.1 and the whole transaction appeared to be successful.
That got me initramfs-2.6.32-358.0.1 back in /boot, but I still get a kernel panic when I reboot the machine. The initial rhgb screen comes up and the little circle thing cranks for a minute or so, but then I get "kernel panic: attempted to kill init!". Booting without rhgb gives me a cursor in the top left corner for a minute, followed by "kernel panic: attemtped to kill init!". The last time /var/log/boot.log was written to was the last time the machine was rebooted prior to this whole episode (i.e. a few weeks ago) so there is absolutely no error message or log information available other than the kernel panic message on the screen.
Damn, I hate the idea of having to set all of these machines up again from scratch. Two of them aren't much to re-do, but the third one is the office workhorse machine that does everything from dhcp server to nfs server to print server to you-name-it.