[0.0] Re: [IMC-Tech] RISK: Current Fedora core 3 updates can break your system

[john milton]

Hi:

We have X and KDE installed because for those of us who are new to this 
linux stuff here there are some things we find easier to do in a GUI 
environment (at this time all maintainace work is being done in front of 
the box, not at some remote location). Most of the time when the system 
is running it does not have a logged in user, i.e. the box is sitting at 
the main login screen with the monitor switched off, so yes,we are using 
some resources for X, but few / none of the  desktop GUI resources most 
of the time. We have a P4P800-MX board with 120 gig drive and a gig of 
ram in it so a few hundred meg of disk space here or there for some 
extra packages is far from being an issue.

I did not mean to suggest that we had "everything" installed when we had 
our problem, just trying to discribe an easy way to reproduce the fault, 
at least with our hardware (using the on board video which is and Intel 
  865 chipset hooked to a Compaq P50 monitor) , and its easier to 
describe that than to enumerate what we did have installed.  I did it in 
the first place because I thought the fault might be caused by something 
that we did not have installed, and the easy way to test that theory was 
to install everything and update.

Since I still don't know what caused the fault i.e. what packages are 
breaking each other, or how, it's not clear to me how switching from 
rpm's to apt's would help, could you explain?

Are apt's served from a "secure" site as is the case with RPM's from the 
  Redhat Project?

I have not yet reported to the Fedora release folks, but intend to...

lee azzarello wrote:
> On 9/23/05, john milton <john at johnmilton.ca> wrote:
> 
>>We had a fairly large number of packages running on the box, but nothing
>>that was not part of the latest "stable" distro. "Up2Date" was on to
>>keep everything current...
> 
> 
> You might want to consider using apt, as all Fedora packages are
> available in that format. It's much more flexable and tells you what
> it's doing while it's doing it.
> 
> 
>>The a few days ago an update included a Kernel upgrade, amongst other
>>things, which recommended a reboot of the box. When I did this the
>>system "broke", the X system was corrupted so that the desktop was just
>>a pattern of distorted colors (Looked like a video card hardware
>>failure) and there was also damage to various sysinit stuff, after
>>several failed attempts to patch it I wound up being forced to
>>re-partition  and reinstall i.e. all data was lost.
> 
> 
> First, why are you running X and two desktop environments on a server?
> Second, Doesn't the "everything" option install like 4 gigs of
> software? I know on RHEL it is close to that. If you are running a
> server for an Indymedia site you, have a fixed list of requirements to
> get up and running. I would recommend starting with nothing and
> building the system up to match that list. I don't think Fedora's
> assumptions for what you need will match 100%.
> 
> 
>>The easiest way to replicate this fault is to install fedora 3 (Ours
>>came from the cogeco archive) , select a custom installation, and ask
>>for "everything" to be installed. It will work fine. Then go on line,
>>run up2date, and reboot, breakage will occur.
> 
> 
> Have you reported this bug the the Fedora release team?
> 

-- 
Peace: John Milton

Email: john at johnmilton.ca
Web: johnmilton.ca

PGP encrypted mail is welcome, my key is on my website