Linode, Ubuntu and Me

I was in the middle of upgrading my VPS when Linode went down.

Linode‘s recent network outage happened when I was in the middle of upgrading the OS. And when the issue got resolved, I found my VPS broken.

The full story

Soon after Ubuntu‘s new LTS version released, Linode Library published a guide explaining how to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. After one month, I decided to do it. And it was the same day, the network outage happened.

I was in the middle of upgrading. When I saw that my SSH terminal stopped responding, I thought that I made some mistake. I tried to login to Linode control panel, but the site was not resolving! I feared the worst.

I checked their twitter account, but couldn’t find anything about any outage. But I found a lot of tweeple complaining about it. After some time, there were an official tweet.

When the issue got resolved, I found that I can’t login via SSH. So, I tried the Ajax console from the Linode control panel. I got the following error:

init: ureadahead main process (977) terminated with status 5
mount: mount point /dev/pts does not exist
mountall: mount /dev/pts [987] terminated with status 32
mountall: Filesystem could not be mounted: /dev/pts
mount: mount point /dev/shm does not exist
mountall: mount /dev/shm [988] terminated with status 32
mountall: Filesystem could not be mounted: /dev/shm
mount: mount point /dev/pts does not exist
mountall: mount /dev/pts [992] terminated with status 32
mountall: Filesystem could not be mounted: /dev/pts
mount: mount point /dev/shm does not exist
mountall: mount /dev/shm [993] terminated with status 32
mountall: Filesystem could not be mounted: /dev/shm
init: mountall main process (982) terminated with status 4
Mount of root filesystem failed.

I opened a support ticket. Got a reply within 6 minutes.

The error that you are seeing is common with systems that have successfully upgraded, but have not had the needed changes made to their ‘/etc/fstab’. You can mount your disk image using the Finnix recovery image to make the needed configuration changes. More information on using Finnix can be found at: http://library.linode.com/troubleshooting/finnix-recovery

I created a finnix recovery profile and booted into it, but /mnt/xvdb/etc/fstab already had dev /dev devtmpfs rw 0 0 in it. But I saw a user comment on Linode library post saying that s/he had to use tmpfs instead of devtmpfs. I tried it and booted into normal profile. It worked.

Finally, I got my ubuntu upgraded to 10.04 LTS. But there were two issues. Apache showing a warning on start-up: [warn] NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts and MySQL was not running.

By googling, I found that this problem occurs when there are two instances of NameVirtualHost *:80 in the apache configuration. The new ports.conf already has this entry, so I commented out the entry I had in apache2.conf. That fixed the warning issue.

MySQL problem turned out to be another configuration change. MySQL 5.1 cannot have skip-bdb in my.cnf. Fixed it, and MySQL started running.

It was 2.52 AM when I went to sleep.

But all’s well that ends well. ;-) Learned a lot in the process. Happy about the prompt support by Linode. Not happy about the outages though.

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Author:

Syam Kumar is the Owner and Editor of WebMaster View. He is based in Cochin, Kerala, India. His interests include information design concepts, standards compliant web development and Linux.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 6:31 pm and modified by WebMaster View on Friday, March 22nd, 2013 at 1:18 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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