[The Hundred Gunner]

I've been running Arch on my Raspberry Pi which, today, has an uptime of 367+ days.

1 Year of uptime:


I decided to update it, and it looks like the whole thing took a crap...

It started with this:



And sure enough, programs no longer work:



And sure enough again, the magic numbers for binaries are totally trashed:



Does anybody know what's going on here?

 

[Xaero252]

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Hundred Gunner

I've been running Arch on my Raspberry Pi which, today, has an uptime of 367+ days.

1 Year of uptime:


I decided to update it, and it looks like the whole thing took a crap...

It started with this:



And sure enough, programs no longer work:



And sure enough again, the magic numbers for binaries are totally trashed:



Does anybody know what's going on here?

This is going to be an issue of reading the news. A lot of the news in your case.

I'm gonna attempt to link to appropriate news articles on the Arch webpage, but you gotta be careful, especially when updating stuff like glibc and such in case something major changed)

Here's one such update you'll need to pay attention to:
https://www.archlinux.org/news/binaries-move-to-usrbin-requiring-update-intervention/

Also, look at this list:
https://www.archlinux.org/news/
and anything that says "Requiring User Intervention" between todays date and 366 days ago, you'll want to read.
Usually these steps can be performed after breaking an install using live media. This may be difficult to achieve on rpi but you may be able to use fallback mode/emergency boot mode to achieve this.

Future thought:
ALWAYS check the archlinux.org/news page when doing mass updates, you never know what you missed and what requires your attention unless you do. The developers work very hard making sure they catch stuff that'll mess you up. That /usr/bin change above may quite possibly solve your problems.

I also pray you didn't use the --force option.

 

[Shrak]

Arch while great, isn't really meant to be kept from updating for too long due to it's rolling nature, you'll end up running into more problems depending on the updates. It's not like Debian that would most likely never do a filesystem merge mid release, but just implement it into the next release so that you don't have to worry about possible breakages. The closer to up to date you are, the easier such upgrades tend to go as well. Xearo posted most of what you should have needed to know.

I run several Arch home servers and I take the time to update them periodically. Having a years worth of uptime is great and all, but meaningless if the one time you do update everything goes to the gutter. Better to update monthly or so just to keep things up to date with as little hassle as possible. And of course, always keep an eye on the news, another reason updating more frequently is helpful, less news to have to read through for manual intervention, or at least remembering to check the news before updating.

And I'm also assuming you used the --force flag if you did skip through the bin merge...

 

[The Hundred Gunner]

I didn't realize what I was signing up for when I installed Arch on this system, then.

I'm still not sure exactly why it broke, though. The manual intervention looks like it's intended to ensure that non-official packages are moved properly, and I don't have any of those; this system is extremely minimalistic. Rebooting gave me my commands back (uptime, sudo, etc.), and I can see that the directories are all properly symlinked (e.g. /bin -> /usr/bin). However, updating still doesn't work; my fs must be corrupt since I get I/O errors on directory creation. I never used --force in any case.

I guess I'll go with Raspbian/Debian again; hopefully they fixed that networking issue lol... Thanks for your help, guys.

 

[Tadaen Sylvermane]

Is there a way to get the current news emailed to you instead of having to look for it? Is one of the reasons I went back to Kubuntu. The updates fiddled with things occasionally and I always forget to check the website.

*EDIT* Nevermind. Mailing lists are a new concept for me. Found what I was looking for.

 

[Shrak]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tadaen Sylvermane

Is there a way to get the current news emailed to you instead of having to look for it? Is one of the reasons I went back to Kubuntu. The updates fiddled with things occasionally and I always forget to check the website.

*EDIT* Nevermind. Mailing lists are a new concept for me. Found what I was looking for.

I personally just use an RSS feed from the conky script in my bar

 

[Plan9]

Personally I think Rasbian is totally garbage because of how slow it performs on the Raspberry Pi compared to Arch. You can get away with yearly updates, but it is dangerous (for the aforementioned reasons), however you can still do it if you read the news before doing any updates (also might be worth dd'ing the SD card so you have a snapshot you can rollback to should the worst happen).

edit: just to add, it's worth sporadically snapshotting the SD card anyway because Raspberry Pi's are notorious for corrupting them - even on read only file systems!

 

[The Hundred Gunner]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Plan9

Personally I think Rasbian is totally garbage because of how slow it performs on the Raspberry Pi compared to Arch. You can get away with yearly updates, but it is dangerous (for the aforementioned reasons), however you can still do it if you read the news before doing any updates (also might be worth dd'ing the SD card so you have a snapshot you can rollback to should the worst happen).

edit: just to add, it's worth sporadically snapshotting the SD card anyway because Raspberry Pi's are notorious for corrupting them - even on read only file systems!

You know, I always thought the same thing about Raspbian. And Pidora - that was horribly slow. I did like how Arch almost performed like a normal system on the Pi.

I haven't used Raspbian for almost a couple of years now. Maybe things have changed; I'll give it a shot, and if it's still crap, I guess I'll go back to Arch and deal with the updates lol

 

[cones]

Are monthly updates the longest you could go without to many errors most of the time? I was running raspbmc for a while on mine and it did fine until I switched to openelec, I believe it used raspbain as the base/sources. Plan9 I thought it usually only killed cards when you upped the CPU voltage?