Well, as most of my little crew of readers know, I'm a freelancer during my spare time, and as so, I manage and install different servers of different customers, most of them run some flavor of GNU/Linux.

So, this week, I went to my latest installation, a dell R710, because they had a problem where PostgreSQL froze randomly and for an undetermined period of time. Weird thing is that when you or anybody else connected via ssh, PostgreSQL unfroze.

So after discarding PostgreSQL configuration (because of the SSH thing), I investigated a little bit, and found out that some people run across the same issue with different Dell Servers running Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS, and they fixed it rather building a custom kernel or upgrading to 9.x . I decided to do the last one as, theoretically, built kernels have a QA and so.

Wrong. Built kernels may have big bugs. And I faced one of them. Bug #290153. I started up after upgrading to 8.10 (you know, you have to 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04 if you wanna be in Canonical's support) and found the following message:

"Gave up waiting for root device."

Luckily google pointed me to launchpad, only to find out that the answer to the bug is adding "rootdelay=whateverfitsyou" so the driver has enough time to find the SAS drives.

That's not a fix, that's a workaround. According to launchpad note, the fix will be commit to a kernel of... Ubuntu 9.10 !!! And the rest of the mortals running 8.10 or 9.04? Yes I know, we've to update, but, hey, according to https://help.ubuntu.com/ 9.04 and 8.10 are still supported, so, IMHO, they should release a patched kernel for that, or at least a grub patch that adds the line...

whatever, rant mode off, let's go to work.