vmlinuz boot file deleted - options to recover?

Question

A SLES server crashed, and will not restart.

A team member ran this command about half an hour before

zypper remove zookeeper-server - 2.2.6.0-2800 

...Including the spaces. I fear it has inadvertently removed far more than he intended and now the machine will not boot. This is a large Fujitsu SLES machine in a data center where Operator access is problematic. I have console access. This is SLES 11.3 - I have several more of these machines for comparison.

It boots to grub and I see the "grub>" prompt.

grub> boot
Error 8: Kernel must be loaded before booting


grub> find /etc/grub.conf
[1130655,0,10] (hd0,0)

From other machines I believe this file contains this:

setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 --force-lba (hd0,0) (hd0,0)
quit
grub> setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2
Error 11: Unrecognized device string

The other machines all have the linux kernel in /boot: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3231872 May 20 2010 vmlinuz-2.6.32.12-0.7-default

However this machine doesnt have a vmlinuz file in /boot:

grub> find /boot/<tab>
 Possible files are: grub backup_mbr initrd-2.6.32.12-0.7-default-kdump

My questions: 1. Could the zypper command above have wiped out lots of packages, including the kernel file? Is this possible? 2. Is it possible that the vmlinuz file is elsewhere? I have the grub "find" command but no "ls" command. On all of my other machines, it is in /boot. 3. Is there any way to push a vmlinuz file to this box to boot it? I'm not the system administrator (its a long story...) so can anyone please advise what is the best technique to diagnose the state of this server?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I believe that the command specified will, unfortunately, have uninstalled the majority of the system.

The zypper syntax uses + and - to specify additional packages to install/remove.

E.g. zypper install vim -emacs will install vim and remove emacs

When nothing is specified after the -, for some reason, zypper removes everything it can...

When I run zypper remove - then zypper immediately shows:

Problem: This request will break your system!
  glibc-2.11.3-17.54.1.x86_64 requires filesystem, but this requirement cannot be provided

 Solution 1: Following actions will be done:
  keep glibc-2.11.3-17.84.1.x86_64
  keep filesystem-11.1-3.5.3.x86_64
 Solution 2: ignore the warning of a broken system (requires:glibc)
 Solution 3: keep filesystem-11.1-3.5.3.x86_64
 Solution 4: break glibc-2.11.3-17.54.1.x86_64 by ignoring some of its dependencies

This same behaviour occurs with the command you posted.

Unfortunately, I believe that you will have to gain physical access to your server and rebuild it (unless, of course, you have access to a PXE server you can work with).

The team member in question will have likely had to answer y to hundreds of questions like the above so I'd also start with removing him from /etc/sudoers...