Just came up with some interesting (read: frustrating) problems on RHEL3 and RHEL4 today at work, and I've confirmed one of the problems on my up-to-date CentOS4 system at home. I was forced into releasing some RHEL3 systems to replace our aging RH9 systems without time for adequate testing, and that leads to problems like these.
On our legacy RH9 systems, mounting a USB key is no problem, but I can't get it to work on either RHEL3-U6 or RHEL4-U2 (= CentOS4). I'm curious if any CentOS3 or CentOS4 users have any suggestions.
Here are the results from plugging in a USB Key and trying to mount it:
1. On RHEL3-U6, some systems get the following, and there is a workaround:
Message: USB device not accepting new address Workaround: /sbin/modprobe -r ehci-hcd
Message: READ CAPACITY failed ... Unable to read partition table
Workareound: none that I am aware of. The above workaround has no effect.
3. RHEL4-U2 and CentOS4 get the following:
No possibility to mount. As soon as you plug in the USB key, the system goes into a SCSI error loop until you unplug it.
I've googled extensively for an answer, found a few hits for the RHEL3 problem, but no useful solutions.
The RHEL4 problem is apparrently a 2.6 kernel bug. Doe anyone know of a packaged kernel solution for this? I'm using the CentOS unsupported kernel at home, but same problem as in the stock RHEL4 kernel. Have RH possibly fixed this in the U3 beta?
In case you're wondering about the key(s), the mount works flawlessly including KDE automounting the key on my Kubuntu Dapper development system with kernel 2.6.15-16-386 #1 PREEMPT.
TIA,
-- Collins Richey The agnostic dyslexic insomniac lies awake wondering if there is a dog.
On Fri, 2006-03-03 at 19:32 -0700, Collins Richey wrote:
Just came up with some interesting (read: frustrating) problems on RHEL3 and RHEL4 today at work, and I've confirmed one of the problems on my up-to-date CentOS4 system at home. I was forced into releasing some RHEL3 systems to replace our aging RH9 systems without time for adequate testing, and that leads to problems like these.
On our legacy RH9 systems, mounting a USB key is no problem, but I can't get it to work on either RHEL3-U6 or RHEL4-U2 (= CentOS4). I'm curious if any CentOS3 or CentOS4 users have any suggestions.
Here are the results from plugging in a USB Key and trying to mount it:
- On RHEL3-U6, some systems get the following, and there is a workaround:
Message: USB device not accepting new address Workaround: /sbin/modprobe -r ehci-hcd
Message: READ CAPACITY failed ... Unable to read partition table
Workareound: none that I am aware of. The above workaround has no effect.
- RHEL4-U2 and CentOS4 get the following:
No possibility to mount. As soon as you plug in the USB key, the system goes into a SCSI error loop until you unplug it.
I've googled extensively for an answer, found a few hits for the RHEL3 problem, but no useful solutions.
The RHEL4 problem is apparrently a 2.6 kernel bug. Doe anyone know of a packaged kernel solution for this? I'm using the CentOS unsupported kernel at home, but same problem as in the stock RHEL4 kernel. Have RH possibly fixed this in the U3 beta?
In case you're wondering about the key(s), the mount works flawlessly including KDE automounting the key on my Kubuntu Dapper development system with kernel 2.6.15-16-386 #1 PREEMPT.
TIA,
-- Collins Richey The agnostic dyslexic insomniac lies awake wondering if there is a dog. _______________________________________________
You might try the CentOSPlus kernel as it has some added hardware turned on.
On 3/3/06, Johnny Hughes mailing-lists@hughesjr.com wrote:
You might try the CentOSPlus kernel as it has some added hardware turned on.
Thanks for the suggestion.
1. Can you (or someone) suggest a yum.conf addition? I'm not familiar with CentOSPlus. 2. Does the kernel install and upgrade grub like any other RHEL/CentOS kernel? Or is there a different procedure?
-- Collins Richey The agnostic dyslexic insomniac lies awake wondering if there is a dog.
Collins Richey wrote:
On 3/3/06, Johnny Hughes mailing-lists@hughesjr.com wrote:
You might try the CentOSPlus kernel as it has some added hardware turned on.
Thanks for the suggestion.
- Can you (or someone) suggest a yum.conf addition? I'm not familiar
with CentOSPlus. 2. Does the kernel install and upgrade grub like any other RHEL/CentOS kernel? Or is there a different procedure?
since centosplus is defined in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-base.repo ( default mode is disabled ), you can run "yum --enablerepo=centosplus <yum operation>"
every kernel install will upgrade your bootloader, the install scripts will detect if you have grub or lilo installed and update the param's accordingly. The centosplus kernel has a different release string, so in the grub or lilo menu, its easy to choose between the stock and centosplus kernels.
- KB
Collins:
On Fri, 3 Mar 2006, Collins Richey wrote:
Just came up with some interesting (read: frustrating) problems on RHEL3 and RHEL4 today at work, and I've confirmed one of the problems on my up-to-date CentOS4 system at home. I was forced into releasing some RHEL3 systems to replace our aging RH9 systems without time for adequate testing, and that leads to problems like these.
On our legacy RH9 systems, mounting a USB key is no problem, but I can't get it to work on either RHEL3-U6 or RHEL4-U2 (= CentOS4). I'm curious if any CentOS3 or CentOS4 users have any suggestions.
Last week I noticed similar problems with USB Flash/External Drives failing to Automount under RHEL3-U6/CentOS3.6, so your Posting caught my attention. Curiously within CentOS's Archives for some people USB Device Automounting works and for others it does NOT, so I decided to revisit CentOS4 (since it uses a different mechanism for its USB Hotplugging)...
Here are the results from plugging in a USB Key and trying to mount it:
- On RHEL3-U6, some systems get the following, and there is a workaround:
Message: USB device not accepting new address Workaround: /sbin/modprobe -r ehci-hcd
Message: READ CAPACITY failed ... Unable to read partition table
Workareound: none that I am aware of. The above workaround has no effect.
With RHEL3-U6, CentOS 3.5 "clean" (then upgraded to 3.6) adding appropriate entries to /etc/updfstab.default atleast kudzu creates a mount point within /mnt and adds the correct entry to /etc/fstab, although still NO Automounting... From there "mount /mnt/???????" or running "Disk Management" successfully mounts the USB Flash/External Drives. Although it was noted that the kudzu generated entries do NOT always appear with "Disk Management"'s List, although the command-line mount still worked???
- RHEL4-U2 and CentOS4 get the following:
No possibility to mount. As soon as you plug in the USB key, the system goes into a SCSI error loop until you unplug it.
I've googled extensively for an answer, found a few hits for the RHEL3 problem, but no useful solutions.
The RHEL4 problem is apparrently a 2.6 kernel bug. Doe anyone know of a packaged kernel solution for this? I'm using the CentOS unsupported kernel at home, but same problem as in the stock RHEL4 kernel. Have RH possibly fixed this in the U3 beta?
In case you're wondering about the key(s), the mount works flawlessly including KDE automounting the key on my Kubuntu Dapper development system with kernel 2.6.15-16-386 #1 PREEMPT.
Under CentOS4 my results were different... With CentOS 4.1 "clean" Automounting of my Kingston USB Flash Drive actually worked, the Drive ICON appeared on the Desktop (GNOME) and its contents could be viewed once the Drive ICON was opened!!! Additionally the Flash Drive could be Unmounted from within the ICON's Properties...
Unfortunately after a full upgrade to CentOS 4.2 the Automounting no longer worked and the System Logs now recorded some dbus Error Messages about being unable to report warnings (this had NOT been the case with the "clean" CentOS 4.1)!!! Additionally with the "upgraded" CentOS 4.2 "Removable Storage" fails to run: claiming "hald" (HAL Daemon) was not running, when it fact it was??? Under the "upgraded" CentOS 4.2 I also tried the CentOSPlus (per Johnny's suggestion) and found the same problems (whether the "clean" CentOS 4.1, the stock "upgraded" CentOS 4.2 or "Plus" CentOS 4.2 Kernels were used)...
Collins Richey The agnostic dyslexic insomniac lies awake wondering if there is a dog. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Lawrence Houston -- (centos@greenfield.dyndns.org)
Update on this problem:
1) The latest errata kernel for RHEL3-U6 resolved the problem. 2) The kernel from RHEL4-U3 (just released) resolved the problem.
We had opened a trouble ticket with RH support for the RHEL4 problem, but they're not interested "we don't provide support for USB devices". A really NOT fine, but to be expected, attitude.
Also, for RHEL3 the problem only occurs on our HP AMD-64 boxes; the Dell boxes with P4 chips do not encounter the error.
HTH others who have similar problems.
-- Collins Richey The agnostic dyslexic insomniac lies awake wondering if there is a dog.
Collins Richey wrote:
We had opened a trouble ticket with RH support for the RHEL4 problem, but they're not interested "we don't provide support for USB devices". A really NOT fine, but to be expected, attitude.
We had a number of machines that were under paid RHEL support for a few years and the 2 or 3 times we ever called them, when we really needed help, the answer was also "you're SOL, we don't support that" and I had to get the answers from the community at large. While we resolved the problem each time, it just left a very sour taste in our mouth and left us wondering what would happen if we were REALLY in a jam. And this was on enterprise Compaq/HP Proliant rack servers in a datacenter environment doing vanilla web/database/mail/dns chores...nothing exotic. That's when I discovered CentOS and decided it wasn't worth paying Redhat for continued non-support when I could get better support and the same product with CentOS.
Cheers,
On 3/12/06, Chris Mauritz chrism@imntv.com wrote:
Collins Richey wrote:
We had opened a trouble ticket with RH support for the RHEL4 problem, but they're not interested "we don't provide support for USB devices". A really NOT fine, but to be expected, attitude.
We had a number of machines that were under paid RHEL support for a few years and the 2 or 3 times we ever called them, when we really needed help, the answer was also "you're SOL, we don't support that" and I had to get the answers from the community at large. While we resolved the problem each time, it just left a very sour taste in our mouth and left us wondering what would happen if we were REALLY in a jam. And this was on enterprise Compaq/HP Proliant rack servers in a datacenter environment doing vanilla web/database/mail/dns chores...nothing exotic. That's when I discovered CentOS and decided it wasn't worth paying Redhat for continued non-support when I could get better support and the same product with CentOS.
Spoken as a person with a great deal of common sense.
Would that an equal amount of common sense were distributed amongst the VP and upward levels of companies like ours that have determined "you will not use open source products." Paying through the nose is just what we want.
I have no doubt that the support from CentOS and especially from this list is 1000x better than support from RH, but it matters not: the gods have spoken.
-- Collins Richey The agnostic dyslexic insomniac lies awake wondering if there is a dog.
On 16/03/06, Collins Richey crichey@gmail.com wrote:
Spoken as a person with a great deal of common sense.
Would that an equal amount of common sense were distributed amongst the VP and upward levels of companies like ours that have determined "you will not use open source products." Paying through the nose is just what we want.
I have no doubt that the support from CentOS and especially from this list is 1000x better than support from RH, but it matters not: the gods have spoken.
And yet, if Redhat isn't profitable, no SRPMs for the rest us.
I'm happy not having support but equally, I can see situations where it'd be a comfort. And there are circumstances where posting problems/configs to a public mailing list for help might be frowned upon. Say you work for a bank, for example.
Will.
Collins:
On Mon, 6 Mar 2006, Lawrence Houston wrote:
On Fri, 3 Mar 2006, Collins Richey wrote:
Just came up with some interesting (read: frustrating) problems on RHEL3 and RHEL4 today at work, and I've confirmed one of the problems on my up-to-date CentOS4 system at home. I was forced into releasing some RHEL3 systems to replace our aging RH9 systems without time for adequate testing, and that leads to problems like these.
On our legacy RH9 systems, mounting a USB key is no problem, but I can't get it to work on either RHEL3-U6 or RHEL4-U2 (= CentOS4). I'm curious if any CentOS3 or CentOS4 users have any suggestions.
Last week I noticed similar problems with USB Flash/External Drives failing to Automount under RHEL3-U6/CentOS3.6, so your Posting caught my attention. Curiously within CentOS's Archives for some people USB Device Automounting works and for others it does NOT, so I decided to revisit CentOS4 (since it uses a different mechanism for its USB Hotplugging)...
Here are the results from plugging in a USB Key and trying to mount it:
- On RHEL3-U6, some systems get the following, and there is a workaround:
Message: USB device not accepting new address Workaround: /sbin/modprobe -r ehci-hcd
Message: READ CAPACITY failed ... Unable to read partition table
Workareound: none that I am aware of. The above workaround has no effect.
With RHEL3-U6, CentOS 3.5 "clean" (then upgraded to 3.6) adding appropriate entries to /etc/updfstab.default atleast kudzu creates a mount point within /mnt and adds the correct entry to /etc/fstab, although still NO Automounting... From there "mount /mnt/???????" or running "Disk Management" successfully mounts the USB Flash/External Drives. Although it was noted that the kudzu generated entries do NOT always appear with "Disk Management"'s List, although the command-line mount still worked???
More recently I tried RHEL3-U7, as with RHEL3-U6 Mount Points are created and FSTAB Entries are added, but still NO Automounting... Possibly that is by design with RHEL3/CentOS3???
- RHEL4-U2 and CentOS4 get the following:
No possibility to mount. As soon as you plug in the USB key, the system goes into a SCSI error loop until you unplug it.
I've googled extensively for an answer, found a few hits for the RHEL3 problem, but no useful solutions.
The RHEL4 problem is apparrently a 2.6 kernel bug. Doe anyone know of a packaged kernel solution for this? I'm using the CentOS unsupported kernel at home, but same problem as in the stock RHEL4 kernel. Have RH possibly fixed this in the U3 beta?
In case you're wondering about the key(s), the mount works flawlessly including KDE automounting the key on my Kubuntu Dapper development system with kernel 2.6.15-16-386 #1 PREEMPT.
Under CentOS4 my results were different... With CentOS 4.1 "clean" Automounting of my Kingston USB Flash Drive actually worked, the Drive ICON appeared on the Desktop (GNOME) and its contents could be viewed once the Drive ICON was opened!!! Additionally the Flash Drive could be Unmounted from within the ICON's Properties...
Unfortunately after a full upgrade to CentOS 4.2 the Automounting no longer worked and the System Logs now recorded some dbus Error Messages about being unable to report warnings (this had NOT been the case with the "clean" CentOS 4.1)!!! Additionally with the "upgraded" CentOS 4.2 "Removable Storage" fails to run: claiming "hald" (HAL Daemon) was not running, when it fact it was??? Under the "upgraded" CentOS 4.2 I also tried the CentOSPlus (per Johnny's suggestion) and found the same problems (whether the "clean" CentOS 4.1, the stock "upgraded" CentOS 4.2 or "Plus" CentOS 4.2 Kernels were used)...
With the above RHEL3-U7 upgraded to RHEL4-U3 the Automounting is back to working, as it had under CentOS4.1 (before being upgrade to CentOS4.2)... I am curious to see how CentOS4.3 performs once it is released???
Collins Richey The agnostic dyslexic insomniac lies awake wondering if there is a dog. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Lawrence Houston -- (centos@greenfield.dyndns.org)
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Chris Mauritz -
Collins Richey -
Johnny Hughes -
Karanbir Singh -
Lawrence Houston -
Will McDonald