Topic: Upgrade from 5.5 to 5.6 fails

[Andrew Roberts]

I downloaded the new 5.6 unsupported iso, verified the md5sum and burned a new disk.

I enter "upgrade" at the appropriate place, and the the install proceeds.  The install gets to the point where it begins the installation and then comes back with the following, partially garbled error messages:

>>
memory alloc (12 bytes) returned NULL.

install exitied abnormally

sending termination signals....



you may reboot your server etc. etc.
>>

The server does reboot and is functional.

An ideas?

[Steve]

A duff burn ?

My first coaster said kickstart file not found. A subsequent burn from same iso at a lower speed resulted in success

[Andrew Roberts]

I thought the disc might be suspect, so burned another one from the same iso at a lower speed as you suggested... same error.

[Steve]

Youve checked the checksum and now assume the disk is burned ok then as longshot some incompatability problem with the distro and your hardware ?

[Andrew Roberts]

I suppose a hardware compatibility problem is possible.   I just don't think that it is probable, as I've been running e-smith on this machine since version 4, and the machine is currently running  5.5 U 2.

I'll go through the hardware list and see.

[MikeC]

Check that your harddrives are not set to Cable Select. and properly defined as Master or Slave.

[Steve Landers]

> I enter "upgrade" at the appropriate place, and the the install proceeds.  The > install gets to the point where it begins the installation and then comes back > with the following, partially garbled error messages:
>
> memory alloc (12 bytes) returned NULL.

I got the same here - upgrading from 5.1.2 to 5.6 dev.

It is, I am led to believe, a problem with rpm. A google search indicated that running "rpm --rebuilddb" in single user mode before attempting an upgrade might help. It didn't for me, although the upgrade proceeded further before failing.

Unfortunately, I was left with an installation somewhere between 5.1.2 and 5.6 - so I just did a clean install, and restored from the "desktop backup" I had made before attempting the upgrade.

I later discussed the situation with a colleagure who manages a large RedHat installation and his response was "You tried upgrading a RedHat installation .... hah!".

So, my advice would be ... take a backup, try and upgrade and if that doesn't work then re-install.

HTH

Steve

--

Steve Landers                     Scripting Design Studio
Digital Smarties                  steve@DigitalSmarties.com
Perth, Western Australia          DigitalSmarties.com

[Andrew Roberts]

I had to do a clean install, and then restore from a backup.

The clean install was a bit strange, as it "switched" my ethernet cards were around.  

The machine I updated is a "test" box that I use to mess around with at home.  I've got 2 production servers that have _way_ more data backed up on tape.  I'm not too sure I'll be upgrading them soon...

[Brian Barber]

I submitted a bug report.  I encountered the same problem with an upgrade.  Apparently this fellow did as well: http://www.e-smith.org/bboard//read.php?v=t&f=1&i=23472&t=23472

Cheers,
BB

[Dexter Hansen]

I ran across the same problem with a Pentium I - 120 mz box w/64M ram.  

From other posts (http://e-smith.org/bboard/read.php?f=3&i=26336&t=26299) I thought I'd see if there was a way to limit how much memory was used for the install and found another post that recommended getting the boot prompt for syslinux and give an optional command.  I tried it and it works with boot a floppy and a CD).  Hit the shift key a few times during boot up just after memory check to get the prompt, then type in

accept mem=32M

Anything less and my machine didn't have enough memory to load.  Unfortuneatly this also failed for me.  I them popped in another 64M of memory and the upgrade command worked.  

From another post (I think it was also Charlie Brady - but don't flame me if I'm wrong) for another startup/install issue, it was stated that because of a change in the Redhat Kernal, that they would be increasing the amount of recommended memory required for the basic e-smith machine.  This means, it's more of an OS issue than an e-smith issue and that it was a minor oversight with the release.

Best I can tell, everything appears to be working with the only exception being that the email retrival screen has only the retrieval method as listed before the upgrade and no long has the standard and ETRN picks.  Since I am only using as a gateway - it's a non-issue.

Maybe the syslinux tweak will work for someone, if not, it looks like you will need to find some more memory.

Best regards,

D. Hansen

[Brian Barber]

I (and many others) experienced this same errorand I reported this as a bug to Mitel.  They acknowledged that there is a problem upgrading SME Server with less than the minimum requirement for RAM.  (They told me in an e-mail that it's now roughly 256MB).  Backup, perform a fresh install,and restore.  It woked for me.

BB