Topic: Latest update issues. Thoughts?

[whiz]

Yes, I know that the latest updates broke things. What I can't understand is why my plain vanilla installs of phpBB2 and gallery2 have disappeared. They're just not in the /opt directory and no trace of them exists.
I saw the updates updating the packages and reporting that there was an error and the database already existed, but should it have bailed and totally erased everything installed up to that point?

Almost everything that uses mysql now fails.
Even phpmyadmin isn't working at the moment, so I can't check the databases as my command line skillz for mysql are limited to say the least. I'm sure that the databases are still there..
Any advice or documentation direction would be appreciated. I've searched for the last few hours and haven't found anything of much help. I thought it was a permission problem initially... but when the installs are gone....
I'm thinking of renaming the old databases, doing a reinstallation and then deleting the new databases and naming the old ones back again.
Suggestions?

[whiz]

Ah, well. Scratch that. Databases are gone. 

[pfloor]

Yes, I know that the latest updates broke things.

Please clarify yourself here.  The latest update with some specific contribs installed broke things.  The latest update on a stock machine has not broken anything (except a minor annoyance with a clamav cron job running twice).

What I can't understand is why my plain vanilla installs of phpBB2 and gallery2 have disappeared.

In simple terms, the person that prepared those RPM's (both of them) wrote in some very dangerous pre/post scripts that will delete your databases and/or folders when the package is updated.

Ah, well. Scratch that. Databases are gone. 

Yes they are, the %post script in the RPMs were told to delete them as per my comment above.

You need to report a bug against each package in the bug tracker.

[janet]

whiz

Databases are gone

That's one of the reasons you should always do a backup before any upgrade.
There are now many good choices available to backup your system, see the Howto & Contribs pages, so there is really no excuse not to do a backup.

I'm guessing that you have the smecontribs repo enabled, rather than disabled, and that allowed updates of contribs to automatically happen during the main system update.

That IS NOT the recommended best practice. All repos other than standard ones, should be disabled, see the FAQ. To update contribs etc, you then manually invoke the update with something like

yum update --enablerepo=smecontribs smeserver-packagename
or
yum update --enablerepo=smecontribs

and be very aware during this seperate update procedure of what is being updated, deleted, changed etc.

Many rpms did not need to be hurriedly updated if you used the workarounds in the Howto Translation page.

After a review of the rpms you could have then updated them one by one, which is a much safer approach.

Ultimately though, those rpms were written incorrectly.

[whiz]

I don't know when the smecontribs became enabled. As far as I knew it was just updating the system. It's all gone quite well since my early days running e-smith 4.1 and I've always balanced backup effort against work required to fix.
The last backup for the phpbb is only two weeks old, so no real harm done.
The 11 thousand photos on the gallery will take some time to sort though...

Such is life. Thanks for your comments mary and pfloor!

[okepc]

My gallery2 vanished from /opt too after the last update!
Luckaly i have a backup offcourse, otherwise i lost a lot of foto's.
The complete dir was erased by updating from smecontribs.
This is not a standalone incident.

My question is are contribs that are goin in smecontribs checked by the dev team for quality?

Dirk

[cactus]

My question is are contribs that are goin in smecontribs checked by the dev team for quality?

Yes but not all are done, one of them is gallery2. It is only imported no checks have been done... besides the removal was in the old RPM, which you most likely did not install from SME Contribs. The same holds fro phpmyadmin.

The removal is caused by a coding flow in the post macro of the RPM that was set to be updated. It goes to far to explain in technical details, but it held instructions to remove the /opt/oscommerce folder as well as the database. The removal code was set to be executed at removal as well as update, where the latter should have been prevented by a simple check in the code that was omitted.

[pfloor]

This thread has more to do with installed contribs rather than the base so I am moving to contribs section.

[Franco]

Wow!!!
I was in the middle of the update when I saw this post!
I have 36519 images I wouldn't want to loose!

Edit. I just saw a sticky thread about the updates after April 19th.

[whiz]

This thread has more to do with installed contribs rather than the base so I am moving to contribs section.

Which means that it won't help anyone who is mistaken in assuming that they're updating their base only.

[janet]

whiz

Which means that it won't help anyone who is mistaken in assuming that they're updating their base only.

If people have enabled repos to automatically updates contribs and other packages, then they deliberately made those changes, which goes against recommended best practice advice.

The information is all there, contribs.org cannot stop people inappropriately configuring their servers.

To quote from the FAQ:

"What is the recommended way to add other yum repositories
The following code uses the dag repository as an example and sets the status to disabled. The repository is configured to be used via the command line with the --enablerepo= option "
See:

http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Documentation:FAQ#Which_repositories_should_be_enabled

http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Documentation:FAQ#Adding.2C_removing_or_disabling_repositories

http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Documentation:FAQ#Other_popular_repositories

[Franco]

whiz
If people have enabled repos to automatically updates contribs and other packages, then they deliberately made those changes, which goes against recommended best practice advice.

I don't have the extra repositories enabled, but I do have a contrib gallery2 which gets damaged without any warning if I update my system.
It's like Microsoft telling me that Firefox and all my favorite bookmarks will get ditch if I update my system, because firefox is not part of windows.

[janet]

stuntshell

I don't have the extra repositories enabled, but I do have a contrib gallery2 which gets damaged without any warning if I update my system.

What then is your explanation for how the gallery2 contrib is getting damaged (by that I assume you mean updated) ?
Please show the output of
db yum_repositories show smecontribs
and
rpm -q smeserver-gallery2

On my sme7.3 fully updated system the first command shows:
(note that status=disabled which it should be)

smecontribs=repository
    BaseURL=http://mirror.contribs.org/pub/smeserver/releases/7/smecontribs/$basearch
    EnableGroups=yes
    GPGCheck=yes
    MirrorList=file:///etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-smecontribs
    Name=SME Server - contribs
    Visible=no
    status=disabled

rpm -q smeserver-gallery2

Note that the smecontrib repo has
smeserver-gallery2-2.2-3.el4.sme.noarch.rpm

[cactus]

I don't have the extra repositories enabled, but I do have a contrib gallery2 which gets damaged without any warning if I update my system.
It's like Microsoft telling me that Firefox and all my favorite bookmarks will get ditch if I update my system, because firefox is not part of windows.

That problem is explained in this thread a few messages ago.

Again, in short, the author of the contrib made a dangerous code section in his contrib that only should have been run on removal of the contrib, he forgot to code an exception for updates, this was done before import in smecontribs and because of that there is no way for the dev team to fix it in the already installed version, as it as to do with the order and way scripts in the RPM are ran automatically.

If the author would have released a new version outside of the scope of smecontribs the same would have happened.

The SME Contribs repository is there to increase the quality of contribs as a lot off contribs scattered around have a very poor coding style, smeserver-gallery2 is one of them. Try to appreciate the SME Contribs initiative and remember that vital data should be backed-up. It is not the dev teams responsibility that you loose data by installing additional packages, it is however your responsibility to secure your data, especially when off value to you.

One of the benefits of the SME Contribs you might have noticed is that a lot of them now already have the new encoding (and a lot of new locales), because they were imported in SME Contribs as well as some packages having had a strip of dangerous code that was there on initial import.