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!

5 comments:

  1. I just finished upgrading my main desktop Ubuntu install to 10.04. Most. Painful. Ubuntu. Upgrade. Evar.

    And I don't have anything fancy going on in my system aside from requiring the proprietary ATi video driver, which I've gotten down to a 5-10 minute install now. Yeah, I have no RAID, no NICs or other hardware that aren't detected and set up automatically, nuthin'.

    At some point during the upgrade the network manager applet lost its mind, and the system locked hard. Rebooting didn't get me anywhere until I booted into recovery mode, then to netroot, then some dselect/apt-get kung fu untangled things enough to get into X, then I was able to get things the rest of the way unfoozled from there via synaptics and such toys that aren't necessary, but make it easier to see exactly what needs extra luv.

    What a pain. New users upgrading from Koala are going to howl bloody murder if this is "normal".

    One thing that I did think was funny was that my system still boots into the old GRUB with the option to chainload into GRUB2. GRUB2 doesn't show me the correct kernels to boot into, so I'm thinking I'm going to erase that entry from my menu.lst until it's needed.

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  2. I sorta feel your pain, brotha. Except not really...

    I haven't tried an in-place upgrade, instead opting for a clean install. And I was able to successfully execute a clean install on a new AMD Phenom II X4 box, and it is indeed smoking.

    To get the most out of the newer features of this version, I figured that a clean install would be worth the effort of moving stuff from my old box to the new one, and so far it works beautifully. I haven't installed the proprietary nVidia drivers yet, as right now the performance seems good enough and I've heard some bad things about the drivers, so I'll wait a bit before I install em'.

    The RAID 1 server issue is still, well, an ISSUE. A bug report has been filed on launchpad, so I hope to hear about some kind of resolution in the next couple of weeks.

    Good luck, amigo!

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  3. Oh, after that issue, everything's pretty good. Except I like my cursors and for whatever reason, Lynx doesn't care to consistently use custom cursors. Not a big deal. I'm pretty happy with the upgrade.

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  4. Hey thanks for the tips guys. Brant, the exact same thing happened to me upgrading to 10.04 - network applet failed etc. Could you possibly go into more detail about what magic you used to get the install working from net root? You can email me directly here: jesse dot a dot Sutherland at gmail dot com. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Cheers!

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  5. I just spent 3 days trying to get Ubuntu Server 10.04 (32 bit) to install with RAID 1 - Failed. Looks like there are still active bugs with 10.04 server.

    I fell back to 9 - as other people have suggested - works perfectly. Pretty disappointed in this - especially since it's a know issue.

    How can you release a server O/S with broken RAID?

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