Softupdate on 3.4.7 with Debian Squeeze.

[Toomas Tamm]

On Thu, 2013-12-12 at 16:24 -0800, Johan Beisser wrote:

> I'm attempting to get softupdates working correctly to systematically
> update older Lenny systems to Squeeze (then eventually to Wheezy).
> What I'm discovering is that the NFSROOT mounts fine, but everything
> else fails.

Softupdates are designed to run on an installed and booted system.
Basically you log in as root and type "fai -N softupdate". Thus the
filesystems are already mounted when the system booted.

From your description it seems that you have booted FAI in the same way
as for installation, but are trying to execute the softupdate task,
which does not involve mounting the filesystems because they are assumed
to be already mounted.

Given your goal (to upgrade existing systems), I would create a
completely new task. This is not hard: create an appropriately named
script under "hooks" by making a copy of either install or softupdate
task, and then modify that to do what is needed.

For example, I have a very minimal task, running nightly from cron,
which just installs any packages which I have added to the
package_config files. This guarantees that all hosts have identical
lists of packages installed, even if I modify the package lists after
installation.

I created it as a copy of the "softupdate" task, and commented out the
parts I did not want to be executed nightly.

Hoping this helps,

Toomas