Latest initramfs-tools from FAI repo breaks Ubuntu

[Robert Markula]

Hey guys,
since the end of this week (I can't tell the exact date/time, since I've
not been working on the network here; must have been somewhere around
the 1st of april) I suddenly couldn't boot my Ubuntu 9.10 karmic
machines anymore. Grub2 would hang with the error message:

<snip>
/scripts/init-top/brltty: 19: grep: not found
svgalib: Cannot open /dev/mem.

Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmd/line)
  - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
  - Check root= (did the system wait the right device?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules;ls /dev)
Alert! /dev/disk/by-uuid/............
</snip>

The first two lines variated from machine to machine (i.e.
"/scripts/init-premount/lvm2: 39: add_mountroot_fail_mode: not found").

Currently I'm not using FAI productively, i.e. I'm performing manual
installs, then running a cascade of cfengine scripts; so I suspected the
errors to be within these scripts somewhere.

Until today when I did a fresh install, ran apt-get update && apt-get
dist-upgrade and did a reboot. The reboot worked fine until I let
cfengine do its thing, which consists of, among others, adding the fai
repositories and doing an apt-get update again. In the logs I could see
that one package is updated - 'initramfs-tools' has been updated from
the FAI repositories, after which a reboot fails with the above error.
The corpus delicti in this case is 'initramfs-tools 0.93.4-grml02'.

So without the initramfs-tools from FAI, boot works, but with the
initramfs-tools from FAI, boot breaks.

Let me know if you need additional information.

Cheers,
Robert