[CentOS] lost connection during yum update

Sun Mar 10 16:12:14 UTC 2013
Frank Cox <theatre at melvilletheatre.com>

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.

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