[SAC] [support.osuosl.org #23488] OSGeo tracsvn2 unavailable

[Martin Spott]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 08:57:09AM -0700, Lance Albertson via RT wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 3:37 AM, Martin Spott via RT <support at osuosl.org>wrote:

> > As I can't look into the details of the particular KVM config, I'll try
> > a guess. "uname -r" says:
> >
> >   3.4.6-gentoo-osl-guest-x86_64-1
> >
> > Therefore I suspect that someone (TM  ;-)  has hooked a Gentoo boot
> > disk image into the VM setup. The Ganeti page says:
> >
> >   Kernel Path   /boot/guest/vmlinuz-x86_64
> 
> 
> That's odd. We normally don't do that for non-gentoo hosts and I'd prefer
> to stay away from that as we're moving away from maintaining those kernel
> images. But I agree it makes it easier to deploy.
> 
> Has the problem only been when upgrading the VM to grub2? We haven't
> updated the images in a long time, maybe we should focus on fixing that as
> well?

Using the Gentoo boot image is a rather pragmatic solution and
personally I'm fine with it, as long as it works.  At least it's by
magnitudes better than a host not being reboot-safe  :-)

Note that since I don't have access to the GRUB error messages on our
OSGeo VM's, my opinion is based on "educated guesses" only.  Now, as
far as I can tell, the breakage relates to the embedding area being too
small for GRUB2, an issue I've experienced on various machines which
had initially been set up with Debian5.

I assume that's a general birth defect affecting all of our VM's and
can be fixed by prepending a few, let's say 10 MBytes at the
*beginning* of each virtual boot disk, followed by adjusting the
partition table accordingly and re-installing the boot loader.

Cheers,
	Martin.
-- 
 Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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