On Sun, 10 Mar 2013 12:14:14 +0100 Reindl Harald wrote:
use "screen" if you update over WAN connections yes, i know it is too late but thats the way to go
I was doing it through VNC, thinking that would be more-or-less equivalent to screen, which it apparently isn't. Somehow my vnc session (desktop) just disappeared in the middle of the job, while I was running "yum update" on the remote host machine and two other computers. Perhaps the "yum update" that was running on the remote host machine killed VNC -- in hindsight perhaps I shouldn't have done that.
My google searching leads me to suspect that initramfs may be missing on those computers. If that is the case (which I will verify later this afternoon) then I'm thinking that perhaps chrooting to the hard drive followed by a simple yum remove kernel-2.6.32-358.0.1 and yum install kernel-2.6.32-358.0.1 will fix it.
It's funny that all three of them died in the same way, though I guess they were all at about the same stage in the update process when my VNC session disappeared.
Running "yum-complete-transaction", followed by "package-cleanup --cleandupes", followed by "yum update" seems to have put everything back the way that it should be, with the exception of whatever it is that prevents the machine from booting.