openSUSE admin

Cannot attach ISO file for virtual CDROM, the firmware is not activated with a "SFT-OOB-LIC" license.
Alternative is using HTTP boot, but it would require some work:

• configure DHCP and HTTP server somewhere
• write a GRUB configuration and place it on the HTTP server
• reconfigure switch ports to access ports in the relevant VLAN

... a bit overkill just for testing if booting from a different media works.

I will ask about the license or for someone to plug in a pen drive.

Acquired the licenses, made #162428.

Booting from live media works, so maybe the 15.6 upgrade nuked the bootable RAID afterall.

Within the live environment, the RAID is found to be fine and so is the boot partition.
Inside a chroot, pbl --config --install is found to create an odd /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI file on 15.6. On 15.5, we only have /boot/efi/EFI/opensuse/grubx64.efi. Internet research suggests this to be a fallback path for some platforms. Removing it does unfortunately not help.

Some debugging in the underlying /usr/lib/bootloader/grub2-efi/install does not reveal anything causing this, suggesting it's a change in grub2-install. Unsure whether it's actually problematic though or if the issue is somewhere else. One idea would be to re-install grub2 using a grub package from 15.5.

Indeed, after some fiddling to get networking in the live environment (the rescue ISO ships NetworkManager but our real system has wicked configuration - eventually I just manually configured it) installing the grub2 packages from 15.5

grub2-2.06-150500.29.25.12.x86_64.rpm
grub2-i386-pc-2.06-150500.29.25.12.noarch.rpm
grub2-x86_64-efi-2.06-150500.29.25.12.noarch.rpm

through the chroot and running grub2-install makes the system boot again.

Michael sent a patch upstream. :)

Remaining machines upgraded with added 25_bli workaround.

Patch landed in Factory, waiting for 15.6 maintenance update.