[arch-general] VPS hosting with Arch

[Roman Kyrylych]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 12:58, Roman Kyrylych <roman.kyrylych at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/10/6 Sebastian Köhler <sebkoehler at whoami.org.uk>:
>>
>>
>> Roman Kyrylych wrote:
>>  > And yesterday I started getting errors about inability to allocate PTY
>>> when trying to login via ssh, so I cannot login anymore.
>>> Though I'm not sure it the problem is on their side,
>>> or it's somehow caused by Arch update (udev, maybe?).
>
> Got a reply from support very quickly:
> "Unfortunately some update you installed on Arch has broken this.
> I've recreated the devices for you and the script will now work from our
> control panel as well."
>
>> My vps runs on xen and this udev update
>> http://www.archlinux.org/news/457/ killed my arch vps too.
>>
>> But my provider temporally replaced the Arch Kernel with a newer Debian
>> Kernel so i could compile a new Kernel with Xen support.
>
> LOL! How could I forget about this one? :-)
>
> $ uname -a
> Linux x.vps8ecf0be2.com 2.6.18-128.2.1.el5.028stab064.7 #1 SMP Wed Aug
> 26 15:47:17 MSD 2009 i686 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz
> GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Turned out that this was not the case.
The problem was caused by installing /sbin/udevadm when udev was updated
(as I see the admin have renamed udevadm to _udevadm).
Initscripts check for /sbin/udevadm to see if udev should be used or
static /dev is in place.
And because after update /sbin/udevadm was created - the /dev was
broken by udev after reboot.

So the solution is to remove the udev package (it's not needed anyway)
and put it into IgnorePkg so it's not installed on system update.
Actually, udev should probably be in optdepends of initscripts instead
of depends.

The support staff fixed the "Reset Terminal Devices" script
to also take care of ptys. That was very quick.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)