10.1 online update: and I thought everything was sorted out by now

So I thought, after following all the discussions here, that I could
take the plunge now and upgrade my workhorse machine from 9.0 to 10.1.
Alas, not so. Even after taking to heart all the advice I have read here
and over in ../install-configure-administration I just can't get the
online update to work.

First of all, the "Internet Connection Test" (*) tells me that "The
connection to the Internet failed. See logs for details." The logs
however show no problem at all, and the Internet connection (a trusty
old 3Com 3C905B-TX Ethernet card, configured by DHCP) wotks perfectly
fine when I try to access a few Internet servers from the command line
on the Alt/F2 console. No matter, the installation procedure flatly
refuses to do the online update, claiming that my Internet connection
"failed". If I tell it to skip the test, it skips the update with it, of
course. Sigh.

So I try to run YaST Online Update first thing after logging in, but no
joy either. It just tells me "no patches available" every time.

I try the two (!) "Online Update Configuration" entries in YaST (one
German, one English). The German one presents me with a window
displaying the text "Automatic Online Update Setup", a big empty area,
and three buttons at the bottom labelled "Back", "Abort", and "Finish".
Very cute! The English one says "contacting server" for about 20 mins
and then comes up with a success message, having found a different
update server - but no matter how often I repeat that (getting a
different server each time), YOU still tells me "no patches available".

Finally I come to the conclusion that something is seriously damaged
with my installation and do it all over again from the scratch. But
guess what: the result is exactly the same!

It might be worth mentioning that I am installing from a purchased
original SuSE Linux 10.1 DVD, while most other reports I read here seem
to be based on downloaded versions.

Ideas?

aTdHvAaNnKcSe
Tilman

(*) All texts translated from German, so wordings might differ from what
you see.

--
Tilman Schmidt E-Mail: tilman@imap.cc
Bonn, Germany
- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.

Tilman Schmidt wrote:
> So I thought, after following all the discussions here, that I could
> take the plunge now and upgrade my workhorse machine from 9.0 to 10.1.
> Alas, not so. Even after taking to heart all the advice I have read here
> and over in ../install-configure-administration I just can't get the
> online update to work.
>
> First of all, the "Internet Connection Test" (*) tells me that "The
> connection to the Internet failed. See logs for details." The logs
> however show no problem at all, and the Internet connection (a trusty
> old 3Com 3C905B-TX Ethernet card, configured by DHCP) wotks perfectly
> fine when I try to access a few Internet servers from the command line
> on the Alt/F2 console. No matter, the installation procedure flatly
> refuses to do the online update, claiming that my Internet connection
> "failed". If I tell it to skip the test, it skips the update with it, of
> course. Sigh.
>
> So I try to run YaST Online Update first thing after logging in, but no
> joy either. It just tells me "no patches available" every time.
>
> I try the two (!) "Online Update Configuration" entries in YaST (one
> German, one English). The German one presents me with a window
> displaying the text "Automatic Online Update Setup", a big empty area,
> and three buttons at the bottom labelled "Back", "Abort", and "Finish".
> Very cute! The English one says "contacting server" for about 20 mins
> and then comes up with a success message, having found a different
> update server - but no matter how often I repeat that (getting a
> different server each time), YOU still tells me "no patches available".
>
> Finally I come to the conclusion that something is seriously damaged
> with my installation and do it all over again from the scratch. But
> guess what: the result is exactly the same!
>
> It might be worth mentioning that I am installing from a purchased
> original SuSE Linux 10.1 DVD, while most other reports I read here seem
> to be based on downloaded versions.
>
> Ideas?

Yes, get smart. Seriously, I was always happy using yast and you but
when the whole package management system in 10.1 turned out to be as
broken as it was, I followed the advice to use smart. That was good
advice. I don't see any reason to go back, so I might not even notice
when the big mess gets fixed, except maybe because the postings like
yours will stop. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Suse make an
official switch to smart.

Mark

Tilman Schmidt wrote:

> So I thought, after following all the discussions here, that I could
> take the plunge now and upgrade my workhorse machine from 9.0 to 10.1.

Do you really mean from 9.0 to 10.1?? Not possible without loads of hassle.
Backup your important stuff and do a clean install instead.

10.0 to 10.1 should work provided that the 10.0 installation is not tweaked
too much.

Olav
--
http://home.online.no/~olav.pet/current_view.jpg

Tilman Schmidt wrote:
> So I thought, after following all the discussions here, that I could
> take the plunge now and upgrade my workhorse machine from 9.0 to 10.1.
> Alas, not so. Even after taking to heart all the advice I have read here
> and over in ../install-configure-administration I just can't get the
> online update to work.
>
> First of all, the "Internet Connection Test" (*) tells me that "The
> connection to the Internet failed. See logs for details." The logs
> however show no problem at all, and the Internet connection (a trusty
> old 3Com 3C905B-TX Ethernet card, configured by DHCP) wotks perfectly
> fine when I try to access a few Internet servers from the command line
> on the Alt/F2 console. No matter, the installation procedure flatly
> refuses to do the online update, claiming that my Internet connection
> "failed". If I tell it to skip the test, it skips the update with it, of
> course. Sigh.
>
<snip>
Yast - Installation source
add
Server - mirrors.kernel.org
Directory - suse/update/10.1

Then do an update and Zen/Yast will get updated

Then it will all work

Olav Pettershagen wrote:
> Tilman Schmidt wrote:
>
>> So I thought, after following all the discussions here, that I could
>> take the plunge now and upgrade my workhorse machine from 9.0 to 10.1.
>
> Do you really mean from 9.0 to 10.1?? Not possible without loads of hassle.
> Backup your important stuff and do a clean install instead.

Yes, I went indeed from 9.0 to 10.1 - the upgrade was long overdue.
But the only thing I kept from the old installation was my /home partition.
I formatted everything else and did a new installation, then remounted
the old home partition. Everything works fine, except for the online update.

Thanks for the advice, anyway.

Tilman

Tilman Schmidt wrote:

> Yes, I went indeed from 9.0 to 10.1 - the upgrade was long overdue.
> But the only thing I kept from the old installation was my /home
> partition. I formatted everything else and did a new installation, then
> remounted the old home partition. Everything works fine, except for the
> online update.
>
> Thanks for the advice, anyway.

Sorry, I did not read your post carefully.

After the YOU update my 10.1 online update works fine, except that
catalogues sometimes mysteriously disappear and I have to add them again -
and updates are much slower than they used to. I guess that's because there
is much more parsing of metadata going on?

Olav

--
http://home.online.no/~olav.pet/current_view.jpg

On 17.07.2006 09:35, Clive Eisen wrote:
> Yast - Installation source
> add
> Server - mirrors.kernel.org
> Directory - suse/update/10.1
>
> Then do an update and Zen/Yast will get updated
>
> Then it will all work

Almost, but not quite.

After adding http://mirrors.kernel.org/suse/update/10.1 as an
installation source, Online Update did indeed finally find some
patches - quite a lot of them, in fact - which the source
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/linux/suse.com/suse/update/10.1 that was
still there from the last "Online Update Configuration" run had
apparently been unable to provide, and duly proceeded to update
several libzypp and yast2 packages. Hopes rose, and I proceeded
to run Online Update again in order to retrieve the remaining
updates. That started out rather well, too, so I left the machine
to have supper.

On returning, I found it stuck at 95% of the total, with the last
message "Retrieving samba-client...". The X session was still
responsive except for the Online Update window which would just
display the busy cursor. It wouldn't react to the "Abort" button
nor to the "Close" (X) icon. Trying to end the X session, either
through the Gnome menu or via alt/ctrl/Del, just resulted in a
message "Your session has been saved", but the session would
continue to run. Only after killing the X server through
alt/ctrl/Backspace would the system restart.

Thinking of a network glitch I restarted the online update but it
got stuck again immediately on "Retrieving samba-client..." with
the same symptoms, and this time alt/ctrl/Backspace left me with
a black screen and blinking cursor, and I had no other option left
but to push the Windows, er ... excuse me ... Reset button. (The
latter may be due to the fact that on the last reboot I had tried
the "pci=usepirqmask" boot parameter suggested by a couple of
kernel messages during the preceeding boot. But the fact remains
that online update won't proceed past this samba-client patch.)

So I think I'll better switch to this "smart" thingy after all.
However, this was to be my pilot 10.1 installation, therefore I'd
like to draw some conclusion on how to do future installations:
- Try initial online update but give up if it fails?
- Don't even attempt to do updates with the built-in mechanisms
but install "smart" right away?
- Give up on 10.1 altogether and stay with 10.0 until 10.2 is
released? (I am not ready to do alpha testing on my distribution
right now - got too much other stuff to test, the platform
should just work.)

Opinions?

TIA
Tilman

--
Tilman Schmidt E-Mail: tilman@imap.cc
Bonn, Germany
- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.

> On 17.07.2006 09:35, Clive Eisen wrote:
> > Yast - Installation source
> > add
> > Server - mirrors.kernel.org
> > Directory - suse/update/10.1
> >
> > Then do an update and Zen/Yast will get updated
> >
> > Then it will all work
>
> Almost, but not quite.
>
> After adding http://mirrors.kernel.org/suse/update/10.1 as an
> installation source, Online Update did indeed finally find some
> patches - quite a lot of them, in fact - which the source
> http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/linux/suse.com/suse/update/10.1 that was
> still there from the last "Online Update Configuration" run had
> apparently been unable to provide, and duly proceeded to update
> several libzypp and yast2 packages. Hopes rose, and I proceeded
> to run Online Update again in order to retrieve the remaining
> updates. That started out rather well, too, so I left the machine
> to have supper.
>
> On returning, I found it stuck at 95% of the total, with the last
> message "Retrieving samba-client...". The X session was still
> responsive except for the Online Update window which would just
> display the busy cursor. It wouldn't react to the "Abort" button
> nor to the "Close" (X) icon. Trying to end the X session, either
> through the Gnome menu or via alt/ctrl/Del, just resulted in a
> message "Your session has been saved", but the session would
> continue to run. Only after killing the X server through
> alt/ctrl/Backspace would the system restart.
>
> Thinking of a network glitch I restarted the online update but it
> got stuck again immediately on "Retrieving samba-client..." with
> the same symptoms, and this time alt/ctrl/Backspace left me with
> a black screen and blinking cursor, and I had no other option left
> but to push the Windows, er ... excuse me ... Reset button. (The
> latter may be due to the fact that on the last reboot I had tried
> the "pci=usepirqmask" boot parameter suggested by a couple of
> kernel messages during the preceeding boot. But the fact remains
> that online update won't proceed past this samba-client patch.)
>
> So I think I'll better switch to this "smart" thingy after all.
> However, this was to be my pilot 10.1 installation, therefore I'd
> like to draw some conclusion on how to do future installations:
> - Try initial online update but give up if it fails?
> - Don't even attempt to do updates with the built-in mechanisms
> but install "smart" right away?
> - Give up on 10.1 altogether and stay with 10.0 until 10.2 is
> released? (I am not ready to do alpha testing on my distribution
> right now - got too much other stuff to test, the platform
> should just work.)
>
> Opinions?
>
> TIA
> Tilman
>
> --
> Tilman Schmidt E-Mail: tilman@imap.cc
> Bonn, Germany
> - In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.


Same problems. I tried smart and everything else. Updater kept hanging on
dependencies, so we'll skip 10.1. 10 works great. Years ago, the even
numbered SuSE distros wre less buggy, it seemed. I realize everything is
changed now but you know it is a mess when they have 35 updaters and it is
a jumble.Glad I didn't purchase this one. It is an attractive package. As a
contrast, 10 worked right out of the box without incident. Good luck.