RL 8.6 Disaster & A Saving Grace

Well… Early this morning and late last night, I followed through and made a entire disk backup of RL 8.5 on ocelot. While it was doing its thing I rollovered jaguar to 8.6 – it went smooth as silk.

One of the GREAT things I noticed in jaguar was that Skype was no longer fragmented in appearance in nouveau – something that required the Nvidia Drivers to achieve, but no matter what I do I can not a better resolution better than 1024 x 768. The fragmentation has been whittled down so that nouveau is usable on a system that has a quad core CPU, and a scant 6 GB of RAM.

I also put RL through its paces and all seemed to be well, so now armed with my full disk backup of RL 8.5 I felt very confident to rollover ocelot to RL 8.6. While the rollover went well on jaguar, it did not go well on ocelot. . The first thing that happened was part way through the rollover the machine hung, and I started to get a ton of scrolling error messages. I rebooted the machine only to be greeted by a message that I had no network connection. I went over to jaguar only to be greeted by the fact that I could not unlock the screen locker, the only way to get around it was to reboot the machine. Jaguar had no problems accessing the internet. This time I dropped back to ocelot, but this time I booted openSUSE 15.3 which is on a separate nvme drive. openSUSE had no problems reaching the internet, which means that the problem was not due to some hardware problem (since the same CAT6 cable serves all of ocelot).

This time I checked ocelot against jaguar and set the two machine networks to be the same and suddenly I had my network back up and running. I then quickly proceeded to try finishing the rollover. It got part way through before it hung once again, only this time the network icon on the taskbar disappeared. Several reboots later and now while I was able to login now suddenly I would get a black screen that just hung there until I got a string of error messages once again. Figuring that it could not get much worse I decided to Nuke RL 8.6.

Starting with KNOPPIX 9.1, I brought up fdisk -l to make sure all my drives were seen (they were), then I ran GParted found nvme0n1and ERASED the entire drive. With the entire drive now clean and scrubbed I then reached into my magic bag of tricks and promptly resorted to restoring RL 8.5 from my backup. It worked and I am back in RL 8.5. Had I NOT created an entire Disk Backup before I resorted to updating and rollingover 8.5 => 8.6 I’d be toast. This is the third time my disk backup has rescued me.

The PLAN now is to wait a few days while 8.6 goes through probably a large number of updates, then, and only then, try doing the rollover again. I have no idea why jaguar had no problem with the Network and worked as expected, but ocelot did; no idea why jaguar once the screen locker comes on it stay on, and can not be unlocked; nor why the rollover went flawlessly in jaguar, an ancient machine with only 6 GB of RAM, yet locked up about halfway through the rollover on ocelot, a machine with a 4th Gen NVMe drive, and which has 64 GB of RAM.

To anyone who has yet to rollover their machine: BEFORE you begin the rollover process, BACKUP YOUR ENTIRE DISK FIRST. If things go south you may lose about an hour rolling back your machine o 8.5, rather than several hours, maybe DAYS doing a total reinstall of either RL 8.5 or 8.6 and still may several problems if you go with 8.6.

D’ Cat – Glad, once again, I had done a backup of the OS before I went ahead with the rollover.

A quick NOTE: I can now confirm that the solution to the LOCK SCREEN bug which once your screen LOCKS UP there is no way to UNLOCK it, is to boot the previous kernel which at this time is 4.18.0-348.23.1.el8_5.x86_64. I suppose this is going to be one of those bugs that gets the RAID or Giant Shoe Stomp treatment when the next kernel is released. My guess that will happen within the next two weeks.

Hello @desercat ! It is always a good idea to do a complete system backup, so you are great at following best practices. I don’t know if you were aware, but the screen lock bug came up in testing and is part of our release notes: Release 8.6 - Documentation. It was also one that was reported to the upstream and we feel that it will be patched (soonish) as it is an issue that will crop up for others. Note that the workaround of booting to the previous kernel is also in that Known Issue. Glad you were able to get things resolved!