[2431] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Linux/Athena systems
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Fri Sep 29 03:12:24 2000
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 03:12:07 -0400
Message-Id: <200009290712.DAA04961@stratton-three-sixty-seven.mit.edu>
To: "Louis A. Isgur" <larugsi@mit.edu>
CC: release-team@mit.edu, hardserv@mit.edu
cc: amb@mit.edu
In-reply-to: "[2428] in Release_7.7_team"
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
Executive summary: at least one cause of this problem is fixed in
Athena 8.4.13 which is due to be released on the evening of
10/10/2000.
> 2. Also appear to be coming across linux/Athena systems stuck in the
> (Unable to start X doing console login instead) mode. Ctrl D and
> reboots do not appear to be effective. Usualy end up doing a
> re-install.
I came across w20-575-40 in this state. Additional symptoms included
the fact that ctrl-alt-del said "you don't exist, go away" or
somethign like that, rather than rebooting the machine. I knew
through other means that this machien had required a manual fsck about
24 hours ago. I wasn;t in w20 for that, but I went to look at the
machine to see if I could learn anythign about the lossage associated
with the fsck. When I booted the machine single user, I found
/etc/passwd and /etc/group garbled, /etc/shadow missing, and a passwd,
shadow, and group file in /lost+found. I moved the files from
lost+found into place and removed the extraneous user entries from the
ends of them. When I rebooted the machine again, it came up and
started X.
This is actually particularly good news, since it is a known bug that
the passwd/shadow/group files are not cleaned up at boot time. There
is even a fix for this bug in Athena 8.4.13, which is currently in
testing and scheduled to be released on the evening of 10/10/2000.
Release-team: This is another instance of filesystem corruption
noccuring on the root partition and not the afs cache partition, whcih
means we may still have a problem in that area.
--
Jonathon
