Thursday, April 29, 2010

Trying Out Ubuntu 10.04 RC1 - Fail!

The main server at my place of employment which houses three virtual machines (two linux, one XP) has been acting very flaky over the last month or so. The server tends to crash and restart itself, with the virtual machines sometime coming back up, and other times not.

The reason why the virtual machines do not come back up sometimes is due to the presence of VMware's .lck directories, which do not always get cleaned up appropriately. So, I have to go in there and remove the offending files, and then start the virtual machines back up via the VMware web console.

I have tried just about everything I can think of to find the cause of the server reboots. Temperatures of the four CPU cores is good (checked via the sensors command), as are the hard drives (checked with hddtemp). I've tested the memory, and all looks good there. So, I am at my wit's end.

The server is running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and a new release of LTS is due out tomorrow. I thought that I'd try installing the release candidate on a new server box I put together recently, and see how it faired. Unfortunately, after making my way through 98% of the installation, the installer failed when trying to install the grub2 boot loader.

Gah. There is an option for the legacy grub boot loader, so I tried that. No joy. I am not trying to installed the server OS on exotic hardware here. It is a RAID 1 setup, but I was able to install the same setup in 8.04. I have heard that there is a bug in grub2 relating to multi-boot systems, but that doesn't apply to my setup.

Frak. Frakfrakfrakfrak!