Everytime I start a new RHEL instance, I like to perform a yum update
to start with the most up-to-date system. However, everytime I try to reboot the instance after that, the instance never goes live anymore.
I troubleshooted the root cause to be the kernel update, here are the minimum steps to reproduce the problem:
- Launch a new RHEL 6.1 instance
- Connect, then run:
yum update kernel*
reboot
The system stays down. The system log from the EC2 management console doesn't help much:
...
Please stand by while rebooting the system...
md: stopping all md devices.
xenbus_dev_shutdown: device/console/0: Initialising != Connected, skipping
Restarting system.
No mention of a kernel panic, startup problem, etc. Just stuck there.
From what I can read around, it looks like you can't use the default kernels with an EC2 instance. If that is true, how can I avoid to accidentally update the kernel with yum
, and thus killing my instance, when performing a generic yum update
?