6.9 /boot filling issue

[njm (Nick Marlow)]

Hi,

Dont know if this has been covered on here, or its a known issue, so I thought I would post it.

I have a Nethserver version 6.9 that has been running great in a production environment for a business since late 2015.

Lately the updating has been failing. Turns out the /boot partition was filling with old kernel versions. This can be checked by running the df command from the terminal. I have seen this before on ubuntu server, but have no other experience with CentOS.

Googling revealed that running yum update checks for and installs updates (and I assume that is what Nethserver does). But instead, you can run yum upgrade which removes all but the 3 most current kernels.

But that still failed. It said it needed 9mb of free space on /boot. So i cd’d into the /boot directory and manually deleted a few of the oldest kernels (be careful here). Then I ran yum upgrade again. It did give warnings about those deleted files missing, but it uninstalled all those old kernels and freed up a heap of space.

So, problem solved, until it happens next time.

So hopefully this helps someone out.

So I have 2 questions for the Nethserver team:

In Nethserver 7.4 and beyond, is this still an issue? I am no Linux expert, but I had this continually happening on ubuntu server, and found the solution was to do away with the /boot partition, and have /boot within the main / partition. And later versions of ubuntu server seemed to have done that.

and

Is there a way to prevent this from happening on Nethserver 6.9?

Thanks for the excellent software.

[giacomo (Giacomo Sanchietti)]

@njm

In Nethserver 7.4 and beyond, is this still an issue?

It shouldn’t, but the yum behavior it’s still the same. But the installer also creates a bigger boot partition.

@njm

Is there a way to prevent this from happening on Nethserver 6.9?

Lower the kernel limit to 2.

[dnutan (Marc)]

Here is more information on the issue:

To much kernels installed, but config gives a limit of 5

NethServer Version: 7.4.1708 Module: yum kernel Hi, I’ve found an already discussed problem. I’ve to much kernels installed and can’t do an update because the boot-filesystem has not enough space. Transaction check error: installing package kernel-3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.x86_64 needs 14MB on the /boot filesystem The discussion is at: yum list installed kernel gives me kernel.x86_64 3.10.0-327.el7 @anaconda kernel.x86_64 …

[m.traeumner (Michael Träumner)]

Thanks for reminding me @dnutan
@davidep Could you meanwhile find a solution for doing the updates at the gui?

[davidep (Davide Principi)]

No, I didn’t work on it. But I agree with @dnutan and should investigate the Software center code. If the problem is where I think it is, I bet the solution can be backported to 6!

Thanks for reminding me of it, I added a card here: https://github.com/orgs/NethServer/projects/1#card-10567859