LTSP: dist-upgrade Debian Squeeze to Wheezy

Post by **^rooker** » Wed Mar 19, 2014 12:38 am

We've had a running LTSP 5 on Debian Squeeze (v6), and wanted to do a dist-upgrade to Debian Wheezy (v7).

Problems encountered:

*) Kernel panic:
During boot on the LTSP client, it halted right after setting it#s IP using DHCP with the following messages:

modprobe: module overlayfs not found in modules.dep
sed: can't read /proc/meminfo: No such file or directory
/sbin/init-ltsp: 62: /usr/share/ltsp/init-ltsp.d/50-rm-system-services: artithmetic expression: expecting primary: " / 1024"

Followed by a call trace.
Well, the overlayfs seems irrelevant (according to a thread LTSP-discuss mailing list), as it is substituted by "aufs" in that case.

The problem causing this is, that "/proc" is not properly mounted during boot.
This is done in "/sbin/init-ltsp", but for some (yet unknown) reason, /proc just doesn't work as it should.

Ugly (really, really ugly) workaround. Should never be used. But might help with debugging:
Create a new file on the LTSP-client's chroot: /usr/share/ltsp/init-ltsp.d/00-proc-hack with the following contents:

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umount /proc
bash -l

This will drop you into a shell, where you must manually mount proc:

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mount -t proc -o nodev,nosuid,noexec proc /proc

Then you must do a listing of /proc:

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ls -ls /proc

It should be populated now.
Exit the shell.

The boot process should continue and finish properly.
How happily disguting this hack.

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