Hello Savannah Hackers, Ineiev, This might affect you if things get snarled up! I'll try to push these through with the least amount of downtime.
First let me apologize for being distracted with other things and having little time recently for Savannah issues. I just returned from a week of being completely disconnected on a bicycle adventure with a bicycle tour across Wyoming for example. This summer has been very busy! I have not been able to keep up with the mailing lists. But I have carved out time to work on system upgrades this week and am working through them. Today I have been pushing security upgrades through. These don't radically change anything. So nothing to note. However I plan to reboot the servers for the new kernels. And that's possibly going to be a problem. And might possibly affect things today/tomorrow as we (FSF admin and I) work through the problems. Reboots are the topic of this message. Last month we rebooted one of the systems (internal2) and it did not boot. This exposed a problem with the way the VMs are hosted, booted, kernels selected, and so forth. This next is an "as I understand it" description second hand. Ian has the authoritative view. Currently the community0p server is configured to boot a private grub and that private grub is configured to boot a specific boot path on the VM. This is due to the use of encrypted file system storage which needs to be decrypted before use. Which means that the two parts must work together. In the last month or so a change had been made in the private grub configuration side to use /boot/vmlinuz instead of /vmlinuz and that path not existing the system failed to boot. This was sorted out (Thanks Ruben!) and the system brought back online. This event alerted us to this unexpected snarl. So here we are now working through the details. We are updating the VMs hosted on the community server. The current goal is to have all of the grub configurations there boot the /boot/vmlinuz path and have that path automatically updated (/etc/kernel-img.conf) when new kernels are installed. That's the plan! We will be successful when the VMs once again reboot cleanly. It will probably take some tinkering. I am starting with the non-production VMs (internal2, frontend2) first as those don't affect users. But of course the goal is to have things working smoothly for the production servers. Bob
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