[CentOS] Hosed by 4.2

Mon Oct 17 00:32:07 UTC 2005
Robert <kerplop at sbcglobal.net>

Maciej Żenczykowski wrote:

> I installed Centos 4.2 the day it was released.
> It was a 512MB Ram, Sempron 2800+, Asus K8N-E Deluxe motherboard.
> The install from DVD went fine.
> However the computer wouldn't boot.
> Grub froze after flashing the Loading stage 2 screen with a blank 
> screen. Booting from rescue resulted in rescue mode (anaconda I 
> assume) finishing with an error just after I selected network 
> interfaces on.
> Booting from rescue again (with network off) and fixing grub.conf not 
> to use the splash screen didn't help - still didn't boot from HDD.
> Finally I rebooted from rescue and reinstalled grub - this time the 
> computer boots normally.
> I went through firstboot configuration and X booted ok and I logged 
> into gdm, did some minor configuration tasks (nothing to do with X, 
> mostly iptables related stuff, adding a user, copying a few DVDs as 
> iso images onto the 120GB disk for later and to speed access) and 
> rebooted.
> This time the computer froze upon loading the X server. Mouse would 
> work (move a big block of horizontal random colored lines over a 
> screen full of horizontal random colored lines) but keyboard wouldn't 
> (not leds not ctrl+alt+backspac).
> Had to do a reset.
> This time after verifying nothing got borked on disk it froze again.
> Had to switch to run level 4 do disable gdm.
> Since then the system has been running, but it doesn't seem to be very 
> snappy (but that might not be the OS's fault).
>
> Comments?
> Cheers,
> Maciej Z.

Mine isn't hosed; just slightly confused.

I did a yum upgrade AFTER first manually installing the new kernel. 
Everything went great until I noticed that there hadn't been any screen 
scrolling for a couple hours. Investigation showed that the yum python 
module had taken a nap. After some thought, I decided I could either 
kill it or wait for the next power failure that exceeded my UPS which 
would have been a no-brainer even without a current backup (which I 
had). So, I killed the process, checked the GRUB, gritted my teeth and 
rebooted. All appeared normal except for a screwed up yum database. At 
least, I hope that's all it is and I'll find out Wednesday morning 
following another weekly full backup.

First screen of output from #rpm -qa | sort | less looks like this 
(annotated)
4Suite-1.0-3
a2ps-4.13b-41
aalib-1.4.0-5.2.el4.rf
acl-2.2.23-5
acpid-1.0.3-2
acroread-5.0.10-1.2.el4.rf
alchemist-1.0.34-1
alchemist-devel-1.0.34-1
alsa-lib-1.0.6-5.RHEL4
alsa-lib-devel-1.0.6-5.RHEL4
alsa-utils-1.0.6-3 <<<<-- Hello!
alsa-utils-1.0.6-4
amanda-2.4.4p3-1
amanda-client-2.4.4p3-1
amanda-devel-2.4.4p3-1
amanda-server-2.4.4p3-1
am-utils-6.0.9-10
am-utils-6.0.9-15.RHEL4
anaconda-10.1.1.19-1.centos4 <<<-- Hello again
anaconda-10.1.1.25-1.centos4
anaconda-help-10.1.0-1.centos4
anaconda-product-4.0-2.centos4
anaconda-runtime-10.1.1.19-1.centos4
anaconda-runtime-10.1.1.25-1.centos4
anacron-2.3-32
apel-10.6-5
apel-xemacs-10.6-5
apmd-3.0.2-24
apr-0.9.4-24.3
:
...so, it looks like rebuilding the RPM database will bring happiness. 
My sympathy to those with *real* damage.