WTF

[swestrup]

It never fails. Just as I'm getting ready to call it quits for the day, Linux dies in some improbably manner and I am forced to continue working to resolve the issue. This time, I tried (for the Nth time) to boot a new kernel. It failed again, and so I rebooted back into the old one. Only this time it didn't come up.

It complained that there was no superblock found on /dev/md7. Now, thats the tmpfs partition, so its not like it really mattered, but I wanted to know what was wrong, so I spent some time sorting things out. Well, it turns out it was (for reasons unknown) building all the raid devices with the wrong stuff. It was trying to build /dev/md7 using the swap partitions, and was building /dev/md8 using the partitions for /dev/md7.  Say what?

Anyway, I managed to correct everything by booting off of a liveCD and manually building the raids then re-lilo-ing. I wouldn't have needed the liveCD except that mdadm seems to have no way to Unassemble a stopped raid.

Oh well, its now WAY past time to have supper. I was sort of planning to have finished digesting by now, and been off to bed.

Comments

[thothmeister.livejournal.com]

Your frequent headaches with Linux concern me, since I intend to make my PC dual-boot into SuSe Linux once it works again.

[sps.livejournal.com]

I must admit I have no idea how he does it ;). My work machines generally break when I break them - and understand that my work does involve breaking them!

[swestrup]

I'm sure its entirely due to the fact that I regularly install software patches using the recommended method. ie yum, yast, rpm, urpmi, whatever. All of these tools seem to break things as often as they fix them.

For example, RPM currently doesn't work. Yum was broken (silently) by a previous upgrade, so I installed an upgrade to yum. It (automagically) upgraded RPM to the latest version, which doesn't run on our kernel. I can't install any RPMs to try to fix it, so I'm left trying to compile and install a newer kernel to get things working again...

Sometimes I think I'd be better off always downloading the sources and compiling myself, but I keep discovering that Mandrake uses non-standard places to put things, and patches I know nothing about, so trying to replace a distro-package with a source release often breaks working stuff.

I think 99.44% of all my problems comes from the fact that Linux is far more upgradable that windows (in that it can be upgraded piecemeal) but that it simply doesn't have adequate tools for managing this.

Its not like I didn't go through similar pains when I first started using windows. I tend to radically configure windows. This used to sometimes break windows and often broke 3rd party software, although in recent years its gotten much better.

[sps.livejournal.com]

It's true. The machines I work on, I basically only apply security patches or the odd missing library, because stability is so important. Maybe this means that there need to be two Linux boxen at your place, a production one and a development one! :-}

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

When did you break something upgrading with YaST (YOU, actually)? The SuSE people are ultra-paranoid about updates, and basically only have updates for severe crashers or security fixes (and even then, generally backport the fix to the version of the package they shipped with the distro).

I remember talking to the maintainer of the Debian packages for the OCaml compiler (I think?), and he was explaining to me that since the OCaml people break the binary compatibility with every release (and they release fairly often, like every few months), combined with the OCaml system being separated in multiple packages (compiler, libraries, etc), dependencies between these packages and the Debian policies involving waiting a week or two for packages to be accepted, results in that every few months, OCaml is broken on Debian for two or three weeks at a time. If you do "apt-get dist-upgrade" during that time, or "apt-get install" OCaml, you'll break it.

[swestrup]

Nah, I don't think I've even ever *used* YaST. My experience with SuSE has just been patching and installing some stock kernels. Its just that every time I go to try out a new 'this one works!' linux installer, I have the exact same problems as before.

I've yet to see ANY that have the concept of installing a second (or Nth) version of a piece of software, yet Linux can easily handle that.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

I've been running YaST Online Update every night in a cron job for the last, hmm, four, five years or so, on a number of machines. I think I've had trouble once, where I had added some binary-only drivers to my kernel (with a tarball, not with a package!), and things got a bit confused. Was really my fault, I just re-installed the stock RPMs and re-updated and it set itself straight.