Yum grabbing wrong kernel update????

[Mcguffey, David C]

On 12 Oct 2005 I reported in a message (Subject: FC4 post-yum message
"Kernel panic -- not syncing: Attempted to k ill init!") that yum was
crashing my FC4 load to the point it wouldn't boot.

Today, I finally tracked down the fact that when yum retrieves a kernel
update (2.6.11 to 2.6.13) for i686, the kernel won't survive a reboot.  It
will continue to run after yum is finished, but a reboot causes the message
reported above.

At first I thought that it might be related to the SElinux update.  I yummed
that first, but SElinux was not the problem.

Then I tried to yum everything but the kernel updates, but my --exclude
didn't work, and it only updated the kernel.  yum retrieved
kernel-devel-i686 and kernel-i686, and after the update, everything ran fine
until I rebooted -- of course which failed with the same message.

First question is related to the i686 verses i386 designations.  All of the
other packages yum reported needed to be updated displayed a '.386'
designation.  Only the two kernel updates displayed the '.686' designaton.
Did yum retrieve the wrong kernel update?  If so, why?  If not, then the
next question is: should I allow yum to update the kernel, or should that be
done via another method?

Last question (I know I shouldn't ask more than one question in a post),
what is the proper yum command line to exclude the two kernel updates?  I
want to yum everything but the kernel.

Dave McGuffey
Principal Information System Security Engineer
SAIC, Columbia, MD