Sandy,
Congratulations on the resurrection. Great work.
Going off topic here but I tried to reply directly to you but your mail server
rejected the suse-linux-e address... No spam there!
Question, where did you get a Knoppix 5.2 DVD and is it an English version? I
have not been able to find anything since the 5.1.1 release in January. Google
gives some references to a 5.2 DVD available via bittorrent which I can't use
due to firewall issues.
Would like to have that in my toolbox.
Thanks
Clint
> - Original Message -
> From: "Sandy Drobic" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: opensuse@opensuse.org
> Subject: [opensuse] 10.3 on an old server installed like a dream (nightmare
> version)
> Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:04:17 +0200
>
>
> This is the version where you wish you WERE dreaming or at least leave all
> the mess behind you after exiting the cinema...
>
> The actors:
>
> - Fujitsu-Siemens Primergy 470 (Dual P3-800, Mylex Raidcontroller
> (DAC960PRL) with Hardware RAID5 on three SCSI hdd, currently running with
> Suse Linux 10.0, file system reiser 3)
>
> - OpenSUSE 10.3 DVD 32bit
>
> - one happy sysadmin who successfully tested that the installation dvd
> recognised the raid and didn't scream any warnings up to the point where
> the installation starts
>
>
> Prologue:
> The machine is rather old being from the last century, but as it is still
> reliable and sufficient for the small environment, I would like to keep
> it. I already decided to skip the installation of Opensuse 10.1 and 10.2
> as there were ominous warnings from gparted during the update praparation
> and the installation crashed mostly during install anyway.
>
> So I was very happy, when Opensuse 10.3 didn't raise any fuss like
> warnings "the partitions can not be changed, do you want to use them
> unchanged?" or something like it.
>
>
> Main story:
> Overall I was rather impressed with the speed and ease of the upgrade. It
> detected some unmaintained and non-upgradable packages which I expected
> anyway. Some of the packages were not from the distro or even compiled
> from source.
> The actual package installation went without any problem, the sun was
> shining, it was sunday and everything promised to turn into a great day.
>
> That was when the nightmare slowly started. At the end of the installation
> the system is prepared for the first start of the new OS. Suddenly a
> warning appeared "mkinitrd failed" (or something like that). The
> installation procedure wasn't impressed though, and the countdown for the
> automatic reboot began. 10..9..8..7..6..
>
> My eyes that were glued to the screen resetted and I hit the stop button.
> The countdown was stopped, phew. So, what to do now? No combination of
> keys gave me a shell to intervene.
>
> Finally, with a glum premonition of approaching desaster, I allowed the
> system to reboot, lit a few incense sticks and did a little voodoo dance
> to invoke the gods of luck. It didn't work, the booting system didn't see
> any disks, panicked and finally crashed. The nightmare had arrived and had
> the previously happy sysadmin firmly in his grip.
>
> Was all data/configuration lost and had to be installed from backup? I
> booted once again from the installation dvd, it seemed to recognise the
> partition, so all data apparently wasn't lost. Then I tried to use the
> rescue system to repair the boot configuration. The login prompt appeared
> and I logged in as root. Well, at least I attempted to login. The only
> reaction of the system was that it replied with a service error. So, no
> login via rescue system.
>
> Then I tried to boot from dvd and run the installed system. That resulted
> in a nice little crash but no usable shell.
>
> At that point I decided to take a timeout, eat something and think about
> any further steps.
>
> Half an hour later I began to investigate in earnest, meaning I grabbed my
> Knoppix 5.2 dvd to see in what state the partitions currently were.
> Booting from the Knoppix dvd went without a hitch. It showed all
> partitions on the raid, and I could mount them without any problem. The
> worst of the nightmare slowly began to fade.
>
> /boot resided on its own partition, and I immediately saw that indeed no
> initrd had been installed.
>
> So I installed 10.3 (minimal instalation) as a VM to get a working initrd.
> Five minutes later I copied the initrd on my server and rebooted.
> Lucky, the initrd was accepted, unfortunately it didn't find my raid.
>
> Okay, I thought, let's configure the initrd to include the necessary
> modules. That was when I discovered that the minimal installation did not
> have vi nor any other editor, not even less. Even a manual execution of
> mkinitrd with the list of modules to include only gave a list of missing
> modules errors.
>
> I scrapped the minimal installation and installed a standard KDE version
> instead. 20 minutes later I had a working 10.3 in vmware with all the
> niceties I was accustomed to.
