[CentOS] System Start-Up Issue

[Mark Haney]

On 07/03/2017 10:52 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Chris Olson wrote:
>>      On Monday, July 3, 2017 5:58 AM, "m.roth at 5-cent.us" <m.roth at 5-cent.us>
>> wrote:
>>   Chris Olson wrote:
>> <snip>
>>> I went on vacation right after an update to one of our virtual CentOS
>>> 6.9 systems so it was not restarted for a period of time.  Now it will not
>>> complete boot-up with the gnome display never fully launched.  A progress
>>> bar at the bottom of the start-up screen never reaches completion. We
>>> have not been able to detect a running system on the network.
>>>
>>> Two options for stopping the CentOS 6.9 virtual machine have been tried.
>>> One is to "power off" and the other is to "send the shutdown message".
>>> Both of these options appear to work properly.  The shutdown output
>> <snip>
>> Suggestion: boot to the previous kernel. If that works, reinstall the
>> update, then reboot to it.
>>
>> We had real issues months back, where a yum-cron appeared to half-ignore
>> the exclude=kernel line in yum.conf, and it would consistently fail to
>> boot, but once the above was done, reinstalling the latest kernel, *then*
>> it rebooted with no problem.

Okay, stupid question, if yum-cron was jacked up months back are you 
still using it?  And if so, why?  Never in my life have I ever scheduled 
updates on any server for any reason.  Mostly because I don't trust it 
to do it right.  Also mostly because I use ansible to manage that, and 
that playbook is always manually run just in case there's an issue.

But yeah, you might be hosed. If this is a VM, do you not have a 
snapshot handy?  (I know, I'm late to the party but was camping this 
weekend.

-- 
Mark Haney
Network Engineer at NeoNova
919-460-3330 option 1
mark.haney at neonova.net
www.neonova.net