RHEL 4 Update problem

[Rick Stevens]

Scott Becker wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback. All my partitions are on the one raid volume. 
> After seeing a simular problem in bugzilla, #149184, I booted linux 
> rescue and looked everything over, didn't see anything wrong, so I ran 
> 'grub-install /dev/i2o/hda' and now it works fine. It's my understanding 
> that you're not supposed to have to run this just because you changed 
> the kernel, but for some reason it was necessary. The changelog for grub 
> shows a patch for the i2o_block driver which is new an now needed for 
> the adaptec. The i2o_block maintainer is aware of the problem.

Oh, yeah, I can see why that's necessary.  grub has to know about the
i20 driver layer on top of the low-level SCSI driver for the RAID to
work.  Should be taken care of by a rebuild of the initrd image, but
then again...

> I'm not sure about the state of RHEL 4 in general, it refused to install 
> successfully on my sata drive at home (failing various ways depending on 
> the configuration). I was happy to see 4 released because I was just 
> starting to setup a new machine for our main web site and the new kernel 
> should take better advantage of dual hyperthreaded cpus (four virtuals 
> total). However I'm a bit nervous about updates breaking it. A few weeks 
> ago an update to RHEL 3 killed DNS on another server, requiring me to 
> run 'chkconfig named on' to get it back in action (it took two days 
> before I realized why I could no longer run up2date).

That's what "dig" is for.  The first time something has an issue, I do
a "dig" against the host name, followed by a traceroute.  Helps isolate
network issues.

Well, remember that RHEL4 is based on Fedora Core 3, but it has been,
uhm, "tweaked" to make it EL4.  I'm not surprised there are some
teething problems with it.  FC3 was certainly not a smooth birth.

Sorry I wasn't of more help.  For the price they charge for EL4, you'd
think they'd offer a bit more help.  Remember, this list is by
volunteers.  Most of us aren't Red Hat employees (at least I'm not).

(poking Matt G. in the ribs)
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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