[lug] How do you rpm the rpm rpm???

[Nate Duehr]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2001 at 01:33:37AM -0700, John Starkey wrote:
> > Why do you need 7.0's RPM on a 6.2 machine?  Have you looked in the
> > updates dir on the RedHat mirrors for an updated RPM for 6.2?  That
> > might work a heck of a lot better if you're just looking for a fix for
> > some kind of known problem with 6.2's RPM.
> 
> Nope. Just simply trying to upgrade to 7.0. Little by little I was hoping I
> could do it without booting the cd. Mainly trying to get the libs in there
> for now.

I had a horrible experience with a 6.2 to 7.0 upgrade.  Remember 7.0
follows the LFS for filesystem locations, and many things move.  Where
this really causes trouble is if you had partitions set up correctly for
6.2 -- all of a sudden you'll find that /var is way too small, and
various other problems.  It can even mess up the upgrade completely on a
small drive machine.  It may be better (just an opinion) to get all your
files off you need (config files out of /etc, webpages, databases,
whatever) to some other media and reinstall the machine with 7.0.
Better yet, hang out until 7.1 which is in beta right now.  I have a
feeling there's a lot of bugfixes in that version.

> > > I can't boot from CD because it's dieing from signal 11s.
> >
> > Totally unrelated, methinks.  Signal 11's are usually a bad sign that
> > you have flakey hardware somewhere.  If you're running a dual-boot
> > machine, this may seem untrue as Windoze may run just fine on the
> > hardware, but Linux may not.
> 
> It's both. Explorer really kicked my butt.

What do you mean, both OS's are having problems?

> > More often than not, running tools that
> > check the hardware (without booting Linux or Windows) from a boot floppy
> > will find the problem, and usually it's due to bad RAM or overclocking.
> 
> I experienced the sig 11 with FreeBSD once and it turned out to be a bug in
> that version, but related to RAM. This is the first time I've seen it with
> Linux though,.
> 
> What your saying makes sense. I'm getting a lot of wierd dieing in the
> drive. In the middle of nowhere I'm getting a bunch of hex on the screen and
> at boot the bios (??) are returning "Drive failure may be imminent." I had
> this once before also while trying to install Solaris using another drive.
> It just went away. Not sure how.
> 
> The thing is it's only doing this when the Windoze partition is present. And
> I can install 6.2 fine with Windoze on the drive.

Uh oh.  This really sounds like there's definitely some kind of hardware
trouble here.  I'd make darn sure I had a backup of the important stuff
on this machine -- it's acting not so healthy.

Along with that, you may want to see if the BIOS has any updates
available when massive (and strange) hardware problems crop up, and as
you said... could just be cables.  Try new ones.

And as always with troubleshooting anything like this, the advice to go
slowly and work methodically doing one thing at a time and testing for a
little while is good advice.   The problem will either "disappear" after
one of the changes, or the component will finally fail completely --
making the failure mode a little more "obvious".  :-)

> Thanks. I'll look for it. I was hoping that the upgrade I did on the last
> drive is what fixed the problem. But if I remember correctly a full install
> of Solaris was when it quit (don't know if that would be related, probably a
> looose cable more so??.)

I didn't quite follow that, but if you're saying you've had MULTIPLE
disk failures in this machine, I'd look into the matter a little deeper.
Are the drives getting adequate cooling inside the case?  Is there a bad
cable to the drive controller shorting out and damaging drives?  Is the
controller itself perhaps not healthy in some way?

Unfortunately, hardware problems are tough to find, there's not many
comprehensive test suites out there than can handle the (very extended)
PC architecture, and it's often cheaper to just start swapping commodity
hardware (maybe starting with the cheapest parts -- cables) than to try
to figure it out with software... or wetware (brain).  :-)   hahaha...

-- 
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>

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