Etch->Lenny upgrade gone bad

[Del Merritt]

I am hoping for some help with a problem, an "aptitude full-upgrade"
gone bad.  The history:

   1. Two NSLU2s (hence "slugs", of course), stock (unturboed, unfat)
   2. One runs Lenny, installed from the Debian installer
   3. The other runs Etch, also installed from the Debian installer back
      in the day (I helped diagnose issues with ssh timeouts - see the
      wiki); has an 8GB swap partition (more on this later)
   4. I decide, "time to upgrade the Etch slug"
   5. Update sources.list to point to Lenny [1]
   6. aptitude update
   7. aptitude full-upgrade
   8. watch the oom-killer whack aptitude, many times, in different and
      terrifying ways; go back to step 6, or sometimes do a "dpkg
      --configure -a", if it tells me it needs that
   9. try adding more swap (1GB via dd and mkswap) - problem gets worse
      (for in retrospect obvious reasons [2])
  10. create 256MB swap file; swapon 256MB file, swapoff 8GB partition
      and 1GB file
  11. watch aptitude (and a dpkg --configure -a) "smoothly" finish the
      upgrade, including:
          :
      Setting up build-essential (11.4) ...
      Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ...
      update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-ixp4xx
      Flashing kernel: done.
      Flashing initramfs: done.
      sh-3.2#
  12. install locales it hadn't been there, and I'm not sure if it was
      the victim of the oom-killer or wasn't there in etch for some
      reason; my logs are full of:
      Setting up <some-module> (X.yy) ...
      perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
      perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
              LANGUAGE = (unset),
              LC_ALL = (unset),
              LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
          are supported and installed on your system.
      perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
      locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or
      directory
      locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or
      directory
      locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
  13. aptitude update; aptitude  safe-upgrade; - Yay! - it says I don't
      need any more stuff!
  14. check my ethernet config; looks OK
  15. sync; sync; # deep breath
  16. reboot
  17. wait; and wait; nothing; no ping response; lights are on green
      Disk 1 and Ready/System LEDs; except for a brief time at power up,
      no Ethernet LED activity
  18. power down hard; plug disk in to workstation; look at var/log/,
      and nothing is modified since reboot
  19. plug back into slug and try again; after a while, only Disk 1 LED
      is lit

That's a lot of steps.  I'm guessing that I ended up with a bad flash.  
At least I haven't lost the data on the drive (yet).

I mentioned that I have a "good" Lenny slug.  I'm hoping there's a
clever way for me to flash its vmlinuz (and anything else from the good
Lenny install) to the former-Etch slug.  I'm open to other suggestions;
I haven't tried (yet) plugging my etch->lenny disk to the good lenny
box; aside from MAC address and IP address, is there system-specific
information in the flashed data?

In fact, I happen to have a third slug - still in box - and I'd love to
have a clever way to clone one of the other two without having to go
through the full Debian Installer (or the even slower aptitude
[full|safe]-upgrade process).  Seems that if my problem is indeed a bad
flash, I could use that technique and some judicious disk copying to
create new versions.  But that's a different topic...

Sorry for a long first post here; I've had worry-free slug operation in
the past, and thought I had the ducks in a row.  Thanks for any ideas,

-Del

[1] These steps are somewhat abridged, actually.  So there's possibly
something else I did that didn't help.
[2] Turns out I should have read about swap space and Linux more
closely; bigger swap puts *more* pressure on low-memory and hastens the
onset of the oom-killer.  *sigh*


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[Martin Michlmayr]

Hi Del,

* Del Merritt <del@...> [2009-09-23 21:53]:
> I mentioned that I have a "good" Lenny slug.  I'm hoping there's a
> clever way for me to flash its vmlinuz (and anything else from the
> good Lenny install) to the former-Etch slug.

There is, although it remains to be seen whether it will help.

You can make a copy of your good machine with:
    cat /dev/mtdblock? > backup

and then upload that to your broken machine with:
    upslug2 -U -i backup

> I'm open to other suggestions; I haven't tried (yet) plugging my
> etch->lenny disk to the good lenny box; aside from MAC address and
> IP address, is there system-specific information in the flashed
> data?

The IP address is actually stored on disk, not in flash (at least in
case the Debian).  See /etc/network/interfaces

The MAC address is not stored in flash either.  However, the udev
rules will mention the MAC address to ensure it always uses the same
network name.  So when you plug your disk into the other NSLU2 you'll
have to adapt /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Apart from that, it should work fine.

> In fact, I happen to have a third slug - still in box - and I'd love
> to have a clever way to clone one of the other two without having to
> go through the full Debian Installer (or the even slower aptitude
> [full|safe]-upgrade process).

It's actually pretty easy to clone a NSLU2:

 - tar up the whole disk and untar it to another disk with the same
   disk partition layout.
 - Edit /etc/network/interfaces (in case it has a static IP, rather
   than DHCP)
 - Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
 - Make a copy of flash (as above) and write it to the other
   device (again, as above).

It's on my TODO list to write a HOWTO describing how to clone a NSLU2
but I'm not sure when I'll find the time.

> Sorry for a long first post here; I've had worry-free slug operation
> in the past, and thought I had the ducks in a row.  Thanks for any
> ideas,

No problem.  I hope you get it working.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/


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[Michael Glockenstein-3]

Am Freitag, 25. September 2009 schrieb Martin Michlmayr:
> It's on my TODO list to write a HOWTO describing how to clone a NSLU2
> but I'm not sure when I'll find the time.

By the way, I want to buy a sheeva plug in some months, will there
be an easy way to move my disk from nslu2 to sheeva plug?

Regards, Michael.


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[Martin Michlmayr]

* Michael Glockenstein <neues.nx6c4@...> [2009-09-25 19:45]:
> Am Freitag, 25. September 2009 schrieb Martin Michlmayr:
> > It's on my TODO list to write a HOWTO describing how to clone a NSLU2
> > but I'm not sure when I'll find the time.
>
> By the way, I want to buy a sheeva plug in some months, will there
> be an easy way to move my disk from nslu2 to sheeva plug?

Interesting idea!  I'll add that to my TODO list for a HOWTO.  Please
ping me when you buy your SheevaPlug in case it's not on my web site
by that time.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/


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[Del Merritt]

Martin Michlmayr wrote:

> Hi Del,
>
> * Del Merritt <del@...> [2009-09-23 21:53]:
>  
>> I mentioned that I have a "good" Lenny slug.  I'm hoping there's a
>> clever way for me to flash its vmlinuz (and anything else from the
>> good Lenny install) to the former-Etch slug.
>>    
>
> There is, although it remains to be seen whether it will help.
>  

Well, as you (implicitly) predicted, that didn't help.  Since the HDD is
still quite mountable, I did an:
%  find bin boot etc initrd lib sbin sys usr -ls
in / on both machines.  I then  whipped up a little script to compare
the results, looking for common (and not) files and, when common, if the
sizes matched.  A daunting number are different or only on one or the
other.  *sigh*

So I'll copy my "important" files off of the / partition and then try
one of the "don't blow away my existing partitions" methods of a fresh
lenny install.  I had hoped to avoid this, just 'cuz, but the full
install - once I'm done with all the backups, just in case - is pretty
quick.

And I still need to turbo the beast.  So many projects; so little time.

Thanks for the suggestions, though.

-Del

> You can make a copy of your good machine with:
>     cat /dev/mtdblock? > backup
>
> and then upload that to your broken machine with:
>     upslug2 -U -i backup
>
>  
>> I'm open to other suggestions; I haven't tried (yet) plugging my
>> etch->lenny disk to the good lenny box; aside from MAC address and
>> IP address, is there system-specific information in the flashed
>> data?
>>    
>
> The IP address is actually stored on disk, not in flash (at least in
> case the Debian).  See /etc/network/interfaces
>
> The MAC address is not stored in flash either.  However, the udev
> rules will mention the MAC address to ensure it always uses the same
> network name.  So when you plug your disk into the other NSLU2 you'll
> have to adapt /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
>
> Apart from that, it should work fine.
>
>  
>> In fact, I happen to have a third slug - still in box - and I'd love
>> to have a clever way to clone one of the other two without having to
>> go through the full Debian Installer (or the even slower aptitude
>> [full|safe]-upgrade process).
>>    
>
> It's actually pretty easy to clone a NSLU2:
>
>  - tar up the whole disk and untar it to another disk with the same
>    disk partition layout.
>  - Edit /etc/network/interfaces (in case it has a static IP, rather
>    than DHCP)
>  - Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
>  - Make a copy of flash (as above) and write it to the other
>    device (again, as above).
>
> It's on my TODO list to write a HOWTO describing how to clone a NSLU2
> but I'm not sure when I'll find the time.
>
>  
>> Sorry for a long first post here; I've had worry-free slug operation
>> in the past, and thought I had the ducks in a row.  Thanks for any
>> ideas,
>>    
>
> No problem.  I hope you get it working.
>  

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[Martin Michlmayr]

* Martin Michlmayr <tbm@...> [2009-09-25 19:17]:
> > By the way, I want to buy a sheeva plug in some months, will there
> > be an easy way to move my disk from nslu2 to sheeva plug?
>
> Interesting idea!  I'll add that to my TODO list for a HOWTO.

I have written a NSLU2 -> SheevaPlug migration guide now:
http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/sheevaplug-migration.html

Feedback is welcome.  These steps work for me but I'm sure the guide
can be improved based on other people's experience with the migration.
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/


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