Disappearing Kernels during Yum update

[Kam Leo]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 5:10 AM, Steven F. LeBrun<steven at lebruns.com> wrote:
> On 09/04/2009 01:04 AM, Kam Leo wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 9:48 PM, Steven F. LeBrun<steven at lebruns.com> wrote:
>
>
> Over the past few weeks there have been kernel updates for Fedora 11.
>
> When my system receives updates, usually using yumex, and a new kernel is
> installed, the oldest kernel in my /boot directory is deleted automatically
> and any "title" commands in /boot/grub/grub.conf referring to those kernels
> is also removed.  There are only three kernels at a time in my /boot
> directory.
>
> So far this has not been a problem, though I almost lost some special
> settings in my grub.conf file when old kernels were removed.
>
> My questions:
>
> What controls how many kernels, vmlinuz and associated files, are kept in
> the /boot directory?
>
> Is there any way to change this to save a different number of kernels or
> insure that a specific kernel is not automatically removed from your system?
>
> --
>   Steven F. LeBrun
>
>
> Your request is showing a troubling trend among posters on this list.
> Many do not make use of the fabulous search engines provided by the
> likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google.
>
> The other trend is that many do not bother to look at installed
> documentation.
>
> Please do a "man yum.conf" and "man yum" to learn about the most
> important utility in your toolbox. Then edit /etc/yum.conf and change
> the value for "installonly_limit"
>
>
>
> I apologize for not reading all the manpages before posting.  I did not
> suspect that the issue was with yum itself since I had not made any explicit
> configuration changes to it in over a year and three versions of Fedora.  My
> assumption was that it was a grub or rpm issue  or possibly a kernel
> configuration issue and the man pages for these did not show any indication
> for the change in behavior.
>
> This brings up another question, why is installonly_limit set to 3 in my
> yum.conf file when the manpage for yum.conf states that the default is 0
> (disable).  As I stated above, I have not changed any settings in yum.conf.
>
> This indicates that there is a discrepancy between the manpages and the
> actual behavior.
>
> After reading your response to my post, I did another Google search on this
> issue.  Even after adding the keyword yum to my search, I did not come up
> with a single hit that mentioned that yum did the deletion of the older
> kernels or of the installonly_limit parameter in yum.conf.  I humbly ask
> what key words you would have used in your search for this information,
> especially assuming that you did not suspect yum in the first place?
>
> BTW.  All the Google hits that I read that included yum as a keyword were
> asking or responding to how to manually remove older kernels after yum
> installed a newer kernel.

At times knowing too much can be detrimental to for a successful search.

"fedora number of kernels" got on target hits from Google and Yahoo.
Bing didn't do so well with that query string and required this
modified query, "fedora number of installed kernels", to get on target
hits.