News Group Posts

5.0.4 to 5.0.5 upgrade hangs

SCO has had other screens running on ALT-F2 and ALT-F3 during the OS installation - the F3 is a shell where you can issue commands.

Linux has similar capability.

Upgrade scripts are not always fully checked (one of the many reasons I much prefer a fresh install in most situations). In this case, the installer script expected certain products to be installed.

That was the reason for my follow-up post.

From: Pat Heuvel <pheuvel@optusnet.com.au>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
Subject: Re: Probs upgr 5.0.4 to 5.0.5
Date: Sun, 05 Dec 1999 18:31:40 +1100
Message-ID: <384A14DC.9AA87A4D@optusnet.com.au> 
Cc: bill@wjv.com

Gday all,

A solution!


I set up a few links and got ps working. I was then able to find the
install process.

The install process had a child process which was a grep with a single
argument. This meant, of course that grep was waiting for input from
stdin! Having nothing else to lose, I killed the grep - rustle, rustle
(disk activity), silence. Checked ps again, a second grep. Killed that
one, more disk activity, and the install was away...

The two greps searched for (can't remember the exact) text in the
Netscape and Atlas installs, respectively. These products were not used,
nor were they installed at the site. So that was it!

Thanx to anyone who turned the grey matter in contemplation, and
especially to Bill for his response.

Regards,
Pat

+---------------------------------------------------------+
+  "Logic clearly dictates, that the strokes of the many  +
+   outweigh the strokes of the two..."                   +
+                             (Apologies to Mr Spock)     +
+---------------------------------------------------------+

I would be concerned as to what else might be wrong:

Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
From: Tony Lawrence <tony@aplawrence.com>
Subject: Re: Probs upgr 5.0.4 to 5.0.5
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 13:13:46 GMT
Nntp-Posting-Host: world.std.com


Actually, rather than celebrating your success, you should
be worrying about what might be screwed up on your system.

As you illustrated, the IPU can do stupid things when it
doesn't find what it expects.  In the case of not finding
Netscape and Atlas, it apparently screws up by hanging with
an empty grep.  So you fixed that, but what other
assumptions lurk in the IPU and what happens when the
assumptions aren't valid? Is it noticeable failure as in
this case or perhaps something more subtle that will mess
you up later?  You don't know, and either does anyone else,
and that includes the engineers that wrote it.


Fresh installs are ALWAYS a better idea, period.

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