Thursday 14 June 2012

Adventures with openSUSE 12.1 and a K8N-DL

Decided to upgrade on of my K8N-DL based Opteron boxes to OpenSUSE 12.1 from 11.3. This machine boots from a CF card and then mounts a pair of HDD's in RAID one on /srv and hosts a collection of VM's. The old config used VirtualBox and fitted everything on a 4GB CF card but I wanted to try out VMWare Workstation 8 on this one which is a fair bit bigger (since it effectively packages an instance of VMWare Server and a vSphere client now) so I needed to up this to 8GB.

All well and good - I slotted in the new card and fired up the OpenSUSE CD for installation, telling it to format the CF and then mount the existing RAID on /srv. One little oddity, I thought, is that it labelled the array as md127 rather than md1. So, the installation completes and I reboot...to be confronted by the emergency login in text mode. Not good, so take a look at dmesg and, sure enough, it can't mount /dev/md127 because it doesn't exist. A look in /proc/partitions tells me that now I have device called md1 so I edit /etc/fstab to mount this and reboot - all appears well.

A little down the line, after some patching/updating, I am installing VMWare when I notice that only one drive light is on. Strange. So I run up mdadm which informs me that I now have two arrays, md1 and md127 with one drive in each. Urgh! I delete md127 and add back the, now freed, drive to md1 and after a bit of resync, all seems sane.

However, VMware Workstation was refusing to start, filling the logs with Hostd: error: N7Vmacore15SystemExceptionE messages and streams of hex that looked not entirely unlike a kernel panic...except it wasn't taking the system down. A bit of googling tells me I needed to enable IPv6 to fix this. This works fine but WTF?

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