preupgrade 10 -> 11 pain: network error

[stan]

On Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:55:22 -0400
brian <brian at zijn-digital.com> wrote:

> I've run preupgrade to download packages, etc. At some point, there
> was a msg stating that there was no room for a boot image (i
> believe--it was /boot/something) but that it would be fine if I have
> a wired network connection. I do, so I continued.
> 
> However, upon rebooting, I'm seeing "Waiting for NetworkManager to 
> configure eth0 ..." followed by, "There was an error configuring your 
> network interface."
> 
> The box is, indeed, using a *working* wired ethernet connection (I 
> downloaded the packages, after all). I am not using DHCP. The box is
> on an internal LAN with a floppyFW router.
> 

Do you have command prompt access at that point?  
If you do, try running ifconfig, to see what is going on.
Check /var/log/messages.  Network Manager probably has an error log,
but I'm not familiar with it.

If you have a static IP address (that's how I interpret 'I'm not using
DHCP'), then you should just need to, as root, do   ifup eth0   .

I think NM is getting confused by the static address.

> Can anyone tell me ...
> 
> 1) how to find out *what* this error is?

Can't help you here.

> 
> 2) if I cannot resolve the problem, how to make this box bootable
> into F10 again?

It should automatically boot into F10 on reboot.  I recently did a
failed preupgrade from F9 to F10 and on reboot, I could select the old
kernel from the grub boot menu.  No changes are actually made until all
the ducks are in a row, it seems, so your system should be the old
system with some extra repositories under preupgrade in /var/cache/yum
and an extra boot entry in your boot menu for the preupgrade.  My
problem was different than yours in that it couldn't find the kernel
when rebooting.  I was running custom kernels on that system and that
probably confused preupgrade.

> 
> 3) how to then retry the upgrade process?
> 
Do the preupgrade command again.  All the packages will already have
been downloaded, so it will be faster, though still not quick.  But if
your network card is the issue, it will fail the same way until you can
get around the NM error in finding your card.  Check at bugzilla if
this issue has been reported, and if there is a workaround there.

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/