[CentOS] lost connection during yum update

Sun Mar 10 16:26:51 UTC 2013
Gerry Reno <greno at verizon.net>

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.
>