Hello!
I had some problems with dracut on my server, upgrading kernels led to a "non fatal" error when using yum, which was dracut not writing out an initramfs, in turn making my server unbootable. Non fatal it was not.
I spent some time manually installing kernels, then with the help of (the? One of the?) maintainers of dracut found that running the command "sh -x dracut..." worked.
Annoying, but I could live with it. Eventually, I got frustrated. I use Bash, so I figured there must've been something in Bash's config that had gone awry, leading to the problem. So I removed Bash, deleted all of its config files and reinstalled it. Magically, this seemed to work.
For a time.
The next three upgrades were seamless and worked perfectly. Then I upgraded again recently and the same error came back.
=============================================== Package(s) data still to download: 26 M kernel-3.1.9-1.fc16.x86_64.rpm | 26 MB 00:03 Running Transaction Check Running Transaction Test Transaction Test Succeeded Running Transaction Installing : kernel-3.1.9-1.fc16.x86_64 1/1 Non-fatal POSTTRANS scriptlet failure in rpm package kernel-3.1.9-1.fc16.x86_64
Installed: kernel.x86_64 0:3.1.9-1.fc16
Complete! [root@foo boot]# ================================================
A very cheery "Complete!" that leaves my system unable to boot. Good job I don't have auto updates turned on...
Anyway, trying to manually run dracut: which dracut /sbin/dracut
dracut initramfs-3.1.9-1.fc16.x86_64.img 3.1.9-1.fc16.x86_64
inside of /boot
...and it simply prints out the help, as if I'd not specified any arguments on the command line.
So I remove bash again and try again: =============================================== rpm -ef --nodeps bash rm -rf /var/share/doc/bash-4.1.* cd /etc rm -rf bash_completion.d/ bashrc yum install bash yum reinstall kernel
Reinstall 1 Package
Total download size: 26 M Installed size: 121 M Is this ok [y/N]: y Downloading Packages: Setting up and reading Presto delta metadata Processing delta metadata Package(s) data still to download: 26 M kernel-3.1.9-1.fc16.x86_64.rpm | 26 MB 00:02 Running Transaction Check Running Transaction Test Transaction Test Succeeded Running Transaction Installing : kernel-3.1.9-1.fc16.x86_64 1/1
Installed: kernel.x86_64 0:3.1.9-1.fc16
Complete!
===============================================
As you can see, this worked. Boot has a shiny new initramfs and if I reboot I suspect I'll get a server back pretty sharpish.
Does anyone have _any_ suggestion as to what could be causing this? Or why such a fatal error would be classed as non-fatal? Or why bash would affect dracut? Surely it shouldn't rely on env variables or anything?
Confused,
Scott :)