Topic: Recent update from smeupdates-testing will not reconfigure or reboot

[LANMonkey]

I recently got an email in Hord saying that updates were available after a recent re-installation.  The first thing I did after reinstalling the system was to update it and this was successful.  After the update was successful this time, I clicked the button to "Reconfigure" and the system did not reboot.  I was watching the system's monitor and you could see it was not rebooting.  Furthermore, the monitor is not responding to input from the keyboard, so I can't reconfigure from the terminal administrative panel.  Another thing here is that the last time I updated, the option to update smeupdates-testing was not selected and this time it was.  I did not activate the smeupdates-testing repository.

What is going on?  What should I do?  If this is a bug, I'll report it as a bug.  The system seems to working otherwise, I can access Hord and my websites are still up.  I am reluctant to do a hard shutdown.

Any and all tips and clues would be appreciated.

[LANMonkey]

I have tried running a reconfigure from a PuTTY session using the admin panel.  I get,

Code: [Select]

Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Sun Oct 23 14:35:19 2011):

The system is going down for reboot NOW!
But the system terminal does not show a reboot and the system never goes off.

[mmccarn]

I've seen that before (once or twice over a decade w/ SME servers). I have a sense that it usually happens when I've left a putty session open doing something else on the same server.

I would use 'ps -aux', try to figure out the stuck/frozen process, kill it, then attempt to reboot again.

Failing that, assuming you can still re-connect using putty, you could (since you've already issued the 'signal-event reboot') try 'shutdown -r now'.

After that, I'd try walking over to the keyboard actually connected to the SME and pressing <ctrl><alt><del> (this seems to be tied to a forceful 'shutdown' in linux systems since the 90's).

If none of that worked, I'd cross my fingers and hold the power switch in...

However I get it rebooted, I re-run 'signal-event post-upgrade; signal-event reboot' as soon as it comes back up.

Hopefully you have a recent bootable SME CD on hand, in case you need to boot into 'rescue' mode and run 'fsck'.

[cactus]

Please report issues like this in the bug tracker instead of in the forums. This should not happen, to you or anyone else. The only way to properly diagnose and fix this is by reporting it to the bug tracker.

Please post back a reference to the bug for future readers.

[LANMonkey]

I've seen that before (once or twice over a decade w/ SME servers). I have a sense that it usually happens when I've left a putty session open doing something else on the same server.

I would use 'ps -aux', try to figure out the stuck/frozen process, kill it, then attempt to reboot again.

Failing that, assuming you can still re-connect using putty, you could (since you've already issued the 'signal-event reboot') try 'shutdown -r now'.

After that, I'd try walking over to the keyboard actually connected to the SME and pressing <ctrl><alt><del> (this seems to be tied to a forceful 'shutdown' in linux systems since the 90's).

If none of that worked, I'd cross my fingers and hold the power switch in...

However I get it rebooted, I re-run 'signal-event post-upgrade; signal-event reboot' as soon as it comes back up.

Hopefully you have a recent bootable SME CD on hand, in case you need to boot into 'rescue' mode and run 'fsck'.

I tried killing a suspicious process ID owned by root from the previous day, but that didn't work.  The terminal keyboard would not respond to Ctrl-Alt-Del-Del ...  So I just did a hard shut down and on rebooting, the system showed it was being reconfigured on the terminal.  In server-manager, the software installer says everything is up to date and there are no reconfig warnings.  Just to be sure, I checked reboot from the server-manager and that works too.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

Thanks to mmccarn for your assistance in this.

[cactus]

PROBLEM SOLVED.

Your problem, but not for future users... next time please report a bug in order to properly diagnose the root cause. This will not only benefit you, but others using this distribution.

Thanks to mmccarn for your assistance in this.

mmccarn, please next time encourage users to report a bug in such cases, especially when a user is running a release that is not officially released and still in beta, in order to get a better product. No diagnosis has been done to determine the cause, which IMHO is a bad thing.

[mmccarn]

mmccarn, please next time encourage users to report a bug in such cases

will do.