dnf upgrade to F26

[Paolo Galtieri]

I tried to upgrade one of my systems to F26 according to the 
documentation at

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade

I did the download and everything went fine.  I then did

sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

and here is where things went weird, there was no output at all on the 
monitor.  The disk light was flashing, so something was going on, but 
nothing showed up on the monitor.  After a while the disk light stopped 
flashing, and I assumed it was time to reboot.  I rebooted, but nothing 
happened, the system did not boot.  I tried several times with the same 
result.  That was yesterday.  Today I downloaded the F26 Workstation 
DVD, burned to a disk and placed it in the DVD drive of the what 
appeared to be a dead system.  This time the system booted, but there 
was no F26 kernel, only F25 kernels.  However, there are f26 packages 
installed.  I was going to redo the download and upgrade, but when I run 
dnf I get this:

[pgaltieri@caseyjones ~]$ dnf
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/usr/bin/dnf", line 57, in <module>
     from dnf.cli import main
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'dnf'

Anyone know what I need to do to fix this system?  There are 2 other 
systems I want to upgrade, but after this experience I'm hesitant to go 
ahead with the others.  This system is my test system so there's nothing 
important on it.

Any help is appreciated.

Paolo

[Sam Varshavchik]

Paolo Galtieri writes:
> I tried to upgrade one of my systems to F26 according to the documentation at
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DNF_system_upgrade
>
> I did the download and everything went fine.  I then did
>
> sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot
>
> and here is where things went weird, there was no output at all on the  
> monitor.  The disk light was flashing, so something was going on, but  
> nothing showed up on the monitor.  After a while the disk light stopped  
> flashing, and I assumed it was time to reboot.  I rebooted, but nothing

A successful upgrade reboots automatically. You never need to manually force- 
reboot an upgrade.
> Anyone know what I need to do to fix this system?  There are 2 other systems

It is certainly possible that you hit some kind of a bug that prevented the  
upgrade from either starting or successfully completing.

But by force-rebooting you just made things worse. All signs are that the  
upgrade was in progress, but by force-rebooting you ended up with a  
completely messed-up, half-upgraded system. Experiences vary wildly, but,  
for example, one of my servers does not use rhgb, so the normal boot  
environment is text-only, and system upgrades are the same. However with  
that server's hardware text output to the system console is slow, and the  
last part of a system upgrade runs for about an hour with nothing happening  
but "Verifying <package name>" slowly being printed to the console, one by  
one for every one of the two thousand-odd packages that were just upgraded.  
No disk activity.

Of course, the situation you described is slightly different - no terminal  
output whatsoever. But the point is that there are times during a large  
system upgrade that pass by with no apparent disk activity. I would not  
attempt to interrupt an upgrade for at least 3-4 hours, after seeing nothing  
happening.

Anyway, if something truly prevented the upgrade from getting started, I  
would've expected little or no changes to have actually occured, and the  
system being mostly undamaged; but based on your description, it's very  
likely that you interrupted a full system upgrade in the middle, with most  
packages being half installed, or uninstalled. Basically, the whole system  
is hosed. Unfortunately there is no magic button anywhere someone can push,  
and fix a busted upgrade of this kind. Botched upgrades can often be  
recovered, by carefully investigating the state of the system, by using an  
install image to boot into recovery, and then picking apart the flaming  
wreckage. Once I accidentally SIGKILLed a regular "dnf upgrade". Not a full  
system upgrade, but a fairly large update, with several hundred packages. It  
was a mess, but it was recoverable.

Unfortunately, as I said, there's no recipe for recovering from this kind of  
a botched system. The recovery process involves direct examination of the  
state of the crapped out system, and figuring out how to fix it.
> I want to upgrade, but after this experience I'm hesitant to go ahead with  
> the others.  This system is my test system so there's nothing important on  
> it.
>
> Any help is appreciated.

I would suggest wiping the test system, installing F25, installing all  
updates, then once against attempting an system upgrade to F26, but keeping  
careful notes this time.

I do concur that F26 turned out to be one of those occasional, painful  
upgrades. The new version of qemu has some kind of a bug that fraks up guest  
VM reboots, causing my Windows 10 guests to reboot into a bizarre recovery  
mode, then claiming that the virtual disk is completely corrupted. Which is  
a bald-faced lie, there is nothing wrong with it. But I didn't figure it out  
until I already wiped one of my Windows 10 guest images, and reinstalled it  
from scratch. Still rather teed off, on that account. But that's what's life  
on the bleeding edge is all about…

[jarmo]

Sat, 26 Aug 2017 17:32:40 -0700
Paolo Galtieri  kirjoitti:
> and here is where things went weird, there was no output at all on
> the monitor.  The disk light was flashing, so something was going on,
> but nothing showed up on the monitor.  After a while the disk light

I have had this. Found, tha If I use HDMI, I don't see any output
in monitor.
Second time, I took VGA cable, connected that into monitor and got
output ok.

First time I just waited and dnf rebooted automatically and my HDMI
connected monitor played well again.

Jarmo

[Ed Greshko]

On 08/27/2017 12:54 PM, jarmo wrote:
> Sat, 26 Aug 2017 17:32:40 -0700
> Paolo Galtieri  kirjoitti:
> > and here is where things went weird, there was no output at all on
> > the monitor.  The disk light was flashing, so something was going on,
> > but nothing showed up on the monitor.  After a while the disk light
>
> I have had this. Found, tha If I use HDMI, I don't see any output
> in monitor.
> Second time, I took VGA cable, connected that into monitor and got
> output ok.
>
> First time I just waited and dnf rebooted automatically and my HDMI
> connected monitor played well again.

FWIW, my main monitor is connected via HDMI.  My secondary monitor is connected via
Display Port.

During the upgrade from F25 to F26 (and prior upgrades) I always got the progress
output to my HDMI connected monitor.

[Paolo Galtieri]

In my case the system I tried to update is a laptop and I don't have an 
external monitor attached.

Paolo

On 08/26/2017 10:52 PM, Ed Greshko wrote:
> On 08/27/2017 12:54 PM, jarmo wrote:
> > Sat, 26 Aug 2017 17:32:40 -0700
> > Paolo Galtieri  kirjoitti:
> > > and here is where things went weird, there was no output at all on
> > > the monitor.  The disk light was flashing, so something was going on,
> > > but nothing showed up on the monitor.  After a while the disk light
> >
> > I have had this. Found, tha If I use HDMI, I don't see any output
> > in monitor.
> > Second time, I took VGA cable, connected that into monitor and got
> > output ok.
> >
> > First time I just waited and dnf rebooted automatically and my HDMI
> > connected monitor played well again.
>
> FWIW, my main monitor is connected via HDMI.  My secondary monitor is connected via
> Display Port.
>
> During the upgrade from F25 to F26 (and prior upgrades) I always got the progress
> output to my HDMI connected monitor.
>
> users mailing list -- [e-mail]
> To unsubscribe send an email to [e-mail]

[Richard Shaw]

I ran into the same issue on my desktop with a primary monitor connected
via DVI and a secondary by VGA, there was no output on the screen so I
assumed the upgrade had hung.

In my case my system was still bootable but because package cleanup happens
last I had a TON of "duplicate" packages installed and dnf didn't know how
to clean them up so I cat'd the duplicates to a file (dnf repoquery
--duplicated) and worked though the list in groups with "rpm -e --nodeps".

Finally got everything cleaned up... My media center computer is connected
via HDMI and had no issues showing the status of the upgrade.

Thanks,
Richard