Updating today?

[Rick Stevens]

On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 16:16 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> Greetings;
> 
> I seem to have a stalled process, or maybe more, with 2.6.23-rc2.  Uptime is 
> 4.25 days.
> 
> Running Smart-gui, it appears to be stuck installing the newer fedora kernel, 
> for about 15 minutes now.
> 
> I also noted that somewhere along the line, a Maxtor USB disk that was plugged 
> in, now seems to be yelping for attention, and I cannot umount it, and that 
> cli is now hung.  The white LED on he front of it is now flashing at 1/2 
> second intervals.
> 
> /Boot seems to have about 18 megabytes of free space, which should be 
> sufficient to allow another kernel to be written, so I'm puzzled.
> 
> Does this walk and talk like any ducks this group is familiar with?

I've found that if a USB device goes wonky, it can suck up all of the
system resources and the machine can become unresponsive.  Just why it
went wonky I can't say (sure you didn't bump the power cord or USB
cable?).  You could try simply unplugging the USB drive.  The task that
was trying to talk to it should eventually time out and the machine may
free up.  Then again, it may not and you'll be relegated to rebooting.

Note that the last thing a kernel update does is modify the grub file,
so the old kernel should still boot.  Then just repeat the update
process and you should be good to go.  You may wish to unplug the USB
drive, just to make sure.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
- CDN Systems, Internap, Inc.                http://www.internap.com -
-                                                                    -
-      "Doctor!  My brain hurts!"  "It will have to come out!"       -
----------------------------------------------------------------------