natty install crashed rendering system unbootable: Using grub-install to make it bootable

Using a dual boot system since years, I always have one partition for my productive system (currently for various reasons still Karmic 9.10) and another partition to test new releases.

Recently I upgraded an Maverick 10.10 to Natty 11.04. All went well. Today I tried to do a fresh install of Natty. This failed twice (ubiquity crashed).

It turned out that the system was no longer bootable (I got a prompt saying grub rescue, neither help nor ? gave me helpful information).

I again started from USB stick, selecting rescue mode. I then mounted my productive root partitition and then issued

grub-install –boot-directory=/mnt/boot /dev/sda

On restarting the system I luckily had a proper grub list again. After some strange error messages my productive system booted.

When it was finally up and running, I again ran grub-install, this time using

grub-install /dev/sda

The mentioned strange messages are gone – may be this is a version issue (grub-install in Natty using files from Karmic).

I will retry the Natty installation but in the first place I will make a really fine backup …

vpnc: no response from target finally solved: AuthType=5

Hi,

I used vpnc instead of CISCO’s vpnclient for a long time. This way I could update my box without rebuilding any kernel modules vpnclient relies on.

Everything worked fine.

But suddenly I could not connect to my companies network any longer. I got:

vpnc: no response from target

Activating debug output did not help me. Fortunately a colleague of mine found a solution.

If you find

AuthType=5
CertStore=1

in the relevant pcf-file (vpnclient configuration file, which will be provided by your organization), you cannot use vpnc 0.4.0 or older any longer. You must get vpnc 0.5.1 and it must be compiled to use libcrypto (SSL).

For me ldd gives me:


lulu:/home/bav> ldd /usr/sbin/vpnc
...
libcrypto.so.0.9.8 => /usr/lib/i686/cmov/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 (0xb7dfa000)
...


So after getting the source package, you will have to change to makefile to read:


OPENSSL_GPL_VIOLATION = -DOPENSSL_GPL_VIOLATION
OPENSSLLIBS = -lcrypto


My configuration looks like this:


IPSec ID foo
IPSec obfuscated secret barbarbarbar
IPSec gateway 1.2.3.4
IKE DH Group dh2
Xauth username MYUSERNAME
IKE Authmode hybrid
CA-File /etc/vpnc/rootcert.pem


The file /etc/vpnc/rootcert.pem holds the appropriate certificate.

Gerd