Hey guys, since the end of this week (I can't tell the exact date/time, since I've not been working on the network here; must have been somewhere around the 1st of april) I suddenly couldn't boot my Ubuntu 9.10 karmic machines anymore. Grub2 would hang with the error message:
<snip> /scripts/init-top/brltty: 19: grep: not found svgalib: Cannot open /dev/mem. Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems - Boot args (cat /proc/cmd/line) - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?) - Check root= (did the system wait the right device?) - Missing modules (cat /proc/modules;ls /dev) Alert! /dev/disk/by-uuid/............ </snip> The first two lines variated from machine to machine (i.e. "/scripts/init-premount/lvm2: 39: add_mountroot_fail_mode: not found"). Currently I'm not using FAI productively, i.e. I'm performing manual installs, then running a cascade of cfengine scripts; so I suspected the errors to be within these scripts somewhere. Until today when I did a fresh install, ran apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade and did a reboot. The reboot worked fine until I let cfengine do its thing, which consists of, among others, adding the fai repositories and doing an apt-get update again. In the logs I could see that one package is updated - 'initramfs-tools' has been updated from the FAI repositories, after which a reboot fails with the above error. The corpus delicti in this case is 'initramfs-tools 0.93.4-grml02'. So without the initramfs-tools from FAI, boot works, but with the initramfs-tools from FAI, boot breaks. Let me know if you need additional information. Cheers, Robert