[BlueOnyx:11109] Re: SL6.2 no boot from degraded RAID1... with fix...BTW 6.3 is OK

[Richard Morgan]

Thanks Gerald for this info.  By bizzare coincodence I lost one disk from my RAID1 pair on Saturday morning (might have been before) and have a plan to sort it on Friday (so this email may have saved me a mass of grief).  Running only the reporting command from the email, I get this:

[root at s6 boot]# find /boot -name 'initramfs*.img' -print -exec lsinitrd {} \; | grep dracut-0
dracut-004-256.el6
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root           19 Dec 11  2011 dracut-004-256.el6
dracut-004-256.el6
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root           19 Dec 11  2011 dracut-004-256.el6
dracut-004-256.el6
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root           19 Dec 11  2011 dracut-004-256.el6

As this is below the -283.el6 that's marked as fixed I'm guessing there will be a problem when I try to reboot - even with a new disk in situ.

So, my question... is the procedure in the email Gerald kindly forwarded both safe and recommended - or is there something else that can be done?

Many thanks, Richard
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Gerald Waugh 
  To: BlueOnyx General Mailing List 
  Sent: Monday, August 06, 2012 1:47 PM
  Subject: [BlueOnyx:11107] SL6.2 no boot from degraded RAID1... with fix...BTW 6.3 is OK


I M P O R T A N T ! ! !
Note: copied from Scientific Linux list Konstantin Olchanski <olchansk at triumf.ca>
 
"======================================
FYI, as a regression from SL6.0 and SL6.1, SL6.2 does not boot from degraded RAID1 devices.

If your "/" is on a RAID1 mirrored across 2 disks and 1 of the 2 disks dies, your system will
not boot because dracut does not activate the required md devices.

This is a very serious problem because RAID1 (mirroring) of "/" and "swap" is a popular
solution for protecting against single-disk failures. The present bug defeats this protection
and makes the situation worse because failure of either of the 2 disks makes your system
unbootable.

It is astonishing that this problem was not caught by anybody's QA, did not receive
wide publicity *and* the solution was not pushed into the current release of SL.

Bug report against dracut was filed in January:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=772926
marked as duplicate of secret bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=761584
solution made available in July for (the best I can tell) the 6.3 release:
http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2012-0839.html (dracut-004-283.el6.src.rpm)
http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2012-1078.html (dracut-004-284.el6_3.src.rpm)

These RPMs are available in SL6 .../6rolling/x86_64/updates/fastbugs/

I confirm that dracut-004-284.el6_3 can boot SL6.2 from degraded "/" (one disk missing).

Note that applying the fix on affected systems is not trivial:

1) rpm -vh --upgrade dracut-004-284.el6_3.noarch.rpm dracut-kernel-004-284.el6_3.noarch.rpm
2) bad dracut is still present inside the /boot/initramfs files, your system is still broken
3) dracut -v -f ### this rebuilds the initramfs for the ***presently running*** kernel, not necessarily the one used for the next reboot
4) find /boot -name 'initramfs*.img' -print -exec lsinitrd {} \; | grep dracut-0 ### report dracut version inside all /boot/initramfs files
5) dracut -v -f /boot/initramfs-2.6.32-279.1.1.el6.x86_64.img 2.6.32-279.1.1.el6.x86_64 ### rebuild initramfs for the latest update kernel
"=======================================

Is fixed is SL6-3
Looks like CentOS with its 6,3 version is OK 




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