On 03/10/2013 12:12 PM, Frank Cox wrote: > 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. What most likely happened: The "yum update" that was running in your lost VNC session was in all likelihood still running. If you had done a 'ps -ef | grep yum' you would probably have seen that yum update was still running. And then it looks like you logged back in to a new session and began running other yum commands before the original "yum update" had completed. So now you have a mess that may not be easy to untangle. It may be easier to restore from backup and then attempt to do the update again. > > 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. >