Arch Linux

kokaku

Member

Registered: 2009-08-11

Posts: 7

Question about initscripts

I updated initscripts and ran into a problem where I could not successfully reboot.

This happened when I updated all packages on my Slicehost Arch slice and managed to prevent my slice from rebooting (some kind of bootup filesystem issue that I could not fix). Long story short, using backups and rebooting, I isolated the problem to the initscripts package.

/etc/rc.conf (my original) & /etc/rc.conf.pacnew (the one created by the initscripts update) were very different - the one the update wanted to create looked very generic while my original was definitely something setup by Slicehost

So, being new to a Slicehost & Arch, I have a number of questions:
* should initscripts ever be updated on an Arch slice?
* are there any packages that should not be updated or are known to be high-risk to update?
* has anyone else run into problems like this?
* how do folks using Arch generally handle package updates? (apparently updating everything is _not_ always the way to go)

I realize that this is probably more of a Slicehost issue than an Arch issue, but I have received no response on the Slicehost forums so I thought I'd try here because folks have been very helpful in resolving other newbie issues (maybe there are similar issues even in a non-slice situation).

thx

toofishes

Developer

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2006-06-06

Posts: 602

Website

Re: Question about initscripts

http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch … 12946.html
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch … 13027.html

Try the latest initscripts package from [testing] (although be careful! if you don't switch completely to [testing] it could be a disaster), it should fix your issues, or simply make the one line fix from the second mailing list post above after re-upgrading initscripts.

Of course your rc.conf is going to be quite different- the default one assumes 1 interface and DHCP, while with a dedicated IP server setup all of that goes out the window.

So your questions:
1. Yes
2. Watch the news, but I am fully up-to-date right now. Sometimes it is wise to hold back on initscripts/udev/related until all issues are worked out, and follow the arch-dev-public ML
3. Yes, I hit exactly what you are saying, and I've advocated that we fix them both. Obviously my voice is a bit louder being a dev
4. Updating everything is the safest way to go unless you are intimately in touch with all packaging activity. If you miss one package during some library rebuild, you can be in for a world of hurt.