[Spacewalk-list] CentOS 5.2 - a warning

[John Hodrien]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, m.roth2006 at rcn.com wrote:

> Well, I've succeeded in reverting to a pre-upgrade snapshot, reregistered
> the system, and did the upgrade.
>
> This is all CentOS 5.2. I'm still on Spacewalk 0.4
>
> HOWEVER, as an FYI, a warning: for some reason, in the x86_64 repository,
> there are a number of i686 packages, including the kernel.

kernel?  Where have you got this from?  CentOS 5.2 doesn't have i686 kernel
packages in the x86_64 repo.  It contains shedloads of i386 packages, and a
few i686 packages.  But big deal, that's correct.

> Apparently, when I tell Spacewalk upgrade, its select picks the first
> package, and so got the i686 32-bit packages. The result of this was, when I
> tried to reboot, it would hang 100% of the time with "request_module:
> runaway loop modprobe binfmt-464c" repeated several times.

Spacewalk /was/ notoriously broken at properly handling x86_64.  I know not
the current state, but I was under the impression it was now mostly fine.

Personally I'd have been happier about trying an upgrade from 5.2 to 5.3 by
subscribing to the 5.3 base channel, and issuing a custom command through
spacewalk of 'yum -y upgrade'.  That way you're not relying on spacewalk's
package upgrade logic, you're just relying on yum.  If yum's logic is broken,
you're probably screwed anyway.

> Once I went to manage software channels, packages, and looked there and
> found them, and then removed them, I had no problem.
>
> Btw, I just looked at the CentOS 5.2, and doing a find at the top level of
> .../pub/centos-5.3-x86_64, I find only two such packages:
> ./base/CentOS/glibc-2.5-34.i686.rpm
> ./base/CentOS/openssl-0.9.8e-7.el5.i686.rpm

Stop getting so excited about i686 packages (unless you've uncovered a juicy
bug in spacewalk to do with how they're handled).  They're nothing special.
Here's the equivalent search for 5.2:

# find . -name "*i686*"
./frysk-devel-0.0.1.2008.03.19.rh1-1.el5.i686.rpm
./glibc-2.5-24.i686.rpm
./openssl-0.9.8b-10.el5.i686.rpm

> So, folks, be warned.... This is *not* a Spacewalk problem - I suppose I
> should tell the CentOS folks, but since I know there are a number of other
> folks working with CentOS here, thought I'd mention it.

Only report it if you're really really really sure you're not wasting their
time.  I just don't see anything to backup your claims of doom.  5.2 repos
look a whole lot like 5.3 repos, and look perfectly fine to me.

> On the other hand, when I click on a package name on the
> system->software->upgrade page, expecting the same info that I see going
> through channels->packages, I get a 500 error.

It's almost like the reported bug against 0.4.

jh

-- 
"I have installed ubuntu 7.04, because I am crap with linux and need
  something simple."                                  -- Anon.