On Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:13:24 -0400
Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Joel Rees writes:
>
> > Anybody want to give give me any advice how to proceed before I go and do something really stupid?
> >
> > (The obligatory excuse: It was plugged in. The power splitter has individual switches and I had switched the outlet off while the notebook was powered down earlier in the afternoon. {mutter.}{grumble.})
> >
> > Battery gave out while it was fairly early in the update list. It still (!) boots.
> >
> > I tried yum upgrade to continue and ran out of /var/cache. (Only 2G. I've got to quit lying to myself and just mount 10G on /var. Or maybe I should mount a special 4G volume on /var, but I'm not sure I should trust LVM.)
> >
> > X11 boots, but the screen flashes a lot. USB seems have drivers from F12,
> > but the USB mouse works. Switching to a virtual console blanks the screen
> > and then I can't get back to the X11 session and I can't bring up any
> > console. I can get a virtual console if I grab it before it goes to X11.
> > Hmm. I may take that back, it's giving me virtual consoles now. But that
> > crazy re-mapping of the mac virtual context menu
> >
> > SELinux had to relabel the filesystem when I booted it just now.
> >
> > Tried to re-run the netinstall CD, but it does not find a good install, so
> > it only gives me the options to install over the existing filesystem or
> > start from scratch. (Or manually set the filesystem up, which will be my
> > last resort, since I can salvage /home and /etc.)
> >
> > I am sort of considering using the volume manager to allocate 4G to /var/cache and trying pre-upgrade. Scary, since I don't know whether I can trust LVM.
> >
> > Oh. The console tells me it's Constantine, but it then reports kernel 2.6.30.10-105.fc11.ppc . Heh.
> >
> > So, does anyone want to tell me, "Don't DO that!!!" about trying preupgrade?
>
> Step 1: run 'rpm --rebuilddb' to verify that your RPM database is halfway
> sane.
Ran for ten or twenty minutes and finished with no output.
No news is good news in this case? Or bad?
> Step 2: run 'rpm -q -a --queryformat '%{NAME}.%{ARCH}\n' | sort | uniq -c |
> sort -n'.
And ' | more ' at the end.
Dang, I have to play with the shell more often. I tend to forget how to do things like that.
> This gives a list of packages that were upgraded, but the older package was
> not uninstalled.
{thinking-to-myself}
Are you sure? That list is a lot longer than the machine had time to update. Hmm kernel is in the list, and yum info tells me I have three kernels from F11 installed. (Current and backup, I know.) ant, on the other hand, only has one version installed, which i expect. Hmmmmmm.
{thinking-to-myself.}
man uniq
man sort
rpm -q -a --queryformat '%{NAME}.%{ARCH}\n' | more
Man, I'm rusty.
Okay, uniq - c to count how many times the package shows in the sorted list, and sort -n to push the duplicates to the end of the list. Got it.
> Very common borkage when things crap out in the middle of
> an rpm transaction.
>
> Step 3: it's normal for some packages to have multiple versions installed:
> specifically kernel, and the gpg-pubkey dummy package entries.
Oh, yeah, you did tell me that.
> Weed those
> out. For what's left, run rpm -q again to get the version of both the old
> and the new package, then rpm -e the old one.
Ouch. About fifty, sixty packages. That matches the guess I had on how far it had gotten before the battery gave out. (Poor, abused battery. Probably hates me.)
{talking-to-myself}
Do I dare try to use grep to feed that to a loop, or should I do this by hand? And would it be safer to delete the new ones, instead, assuming that, since I never got close to the cleanup phase, none of the old packages would have been deleted.
Anyway, I need to look at what's there.
{talking-to-myself.}
> Until you do these steps, attempting to deal with your upgrade is just
> spinning your wheels.
>
> Step 4: grab and burn a Fedora install DVD. Boot it, and tell it to upgrade
> your existing Fedora installation.
Well, I'm not sure why you suggest that. Extra tools in the DVD? Or just the time actually spent in a mixed state with the netinstall CD, downloading and installing at the same time? Or do you just mean that I should avoid preupgrade?
Thanks. This should help me get the poor thing back up and running.
--
Joel Rees
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