Topic: 5.6 upgrade repeatedly hangs

[Dub Dublin]

I'm finally getting around to upgrading one of my e-smith servers from 5.5 to 5.6 (the security holes finally prodded me...), and the upgrade very repeatably fails as it begins the package installation phase with the following message:

memory alloc (12 bytes) returned NULL.
install exited abnormally
sending termination signals...done
sending kill singnals...done
[and it goes downhill from there...]

This is on a system that has no problem with memory that I can find (well, the BIOS thinks it's all OK, anyway - if anyone can recommend a good free memory test program, I'll give that a shot, too.)  Until this morning, it was a fully functioning SME 5.5 server with an uptime of a few months.  Other than rebooting to the 5.6 CD-ROM, *nothing* has been done to that machine, so there's no reason to expect this sort of problem.

Any clues why the install thinks there's a problem here, and what if any workarounds there might be?  Has anyone else run into this?

Please respond to forum, as the problem machine is my main mail server, so it's offline until I get this resolved.

[Dub Dublin]

Problem still there - only clue I've got is that this machine has only 64MB RAM (more than enough for a headless Linux server on a small network.)  All other SME servers I've upgraded - the ones that belong to someone else, not me  all had at least 128 MB...

Are there any known problems with upgrading a machine with "only" 64 MB of RAM?

[Dub Dublin]

Getting desperate.  This is NOT a hardware problem, and I'm really starting to suspect that the SME upgrade wants just a little more than 64 MB in order to proceed.

FWIW, I've been wringing the memory out all afternoon with Memtest86 and have yet to log an error of any kind.  (Get it at memtest 86.com - there's even a version (the one I used) that's a bootable ISO image - this seems like a *very* thorough test - highly recommended and a darn good thing to keep around as part of your toolkit.  If nothing else is positive about this experience, at least I found another good test program.)

Anyway, despite a memory subsystem with an absolutely perfect bill of health, SME stubbornly refuses to install the upgrade packages on this machine, with the same exact failure mode outlined in my first post in this topic.   Any  clues?

[Dub Dublin]

OK, I'll post my own answer.  I finally got desperate enough to steal a 64 MB stick from another machine, and memtest86 showed it worked reliably paired with one of the existing 32 MB sticks even though the hardware manual says they should be matched pairs.  Since Memtest86 was happy with the reliability of the memory system, I went ahead and did the upgrade, which finally completed normally.  Rebooting the system, it again runs fine with only 64 MB.

There is clearly a bug in 5.6 that can prevent the proper upgrading of a system that has only 64 MB of RAM.  Hopefully this will help anyone else that runs into the same problem.

[Ray Mitchell]

Dear Dub
No I don't think there is a bug.
There have been a lot of posts earlier this year about how much memory is needed to do an upgrade to 5.6. I see the minimum hardware requirements are 90MHz CPU with 64Mb RAM, but they also say that usually extra RAM will be more beneficial than adding a faster CPU.
The best answer I have found is that you should have 128Mb and preferably 256Mb.

Note, as you have found, that 5.6 seems to run OK on less ie 64Mb (I have one running quite nicely with that amount), but the processes involved in changing the filesystem from ext2 to ext3 and whatever else apparently do need more RAM than that.

Charlie Brady posted a memory checker at his ftp site
ftp://ftp.e-smith.org/pub/e-smith/contrib/CharlieBrady/memtest/

memtester-2.93.1-01.i386.rpm
e-smith-memtest-0.0.1-04.noarch.rpm

http://www.mail-archive.com/devinfo%40lists.e-smith.org/msg11704.html

Problem: you suspect the RAM in your server, or you wish to stress the
system a little and see that it is still reliable

Answer: install my background memory tester!

# F=ftp://ftp.e-smith.org/pub/e-smith/contrib/CharlieBrady/memtest
# rpm -Uhv $F/e-smith-memtest-0.0.1-04.noarch.rpm  \
    $Fmemtester-2.93.1-01.i386.rpm
# /sbin/e-smith/config set memtest service status enabled
# svc-start memtest

Logs will be found in /var/log/memtest

Do:

# svc-stop memtest
# /sbin/e-smith/config set memtest service status disabled

to stop testing

Charlie Brady
27/3/03


Regards
Ray Mitchell

[Uffe Safeldt]

I also had to plug 128Mb when upgrading....

Uffe