[18956] in Athena Bugs
Larry Stone: athena 9.0 (current) install bug
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Thu May 17 13:58:59 2001
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Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 13:58:48 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
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Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 21:24:25 EDT
From: Larry Stone <lcs@MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: <lcs@MIT.EDU>
To: miki@MIT.EDU, ghudson@MIT.EDU, amb@MIT.EDU
Cc: wdc@MIT.EDU
Subject: athena 9.0 (current) install bug
Message-ID: <CMM.0.90.4.990062665.lcs@defiant.mit.edu>
Here's an odd problem in the install (current as of 16-may 17:00) on
solaris that precipitated some other problems:
1. A vanilla install onto a sparc ultra 5 (orchestrated by miki) got
to the point of dumping me in the single-user shell for modifications,
so I set up a couple things, edited (carefully!) /etc/athena/rc.conf,
etc. At the time, I didn't notice anything wrong with that file,
but there was...
2. When the system rebooted, right after the kernel's configuration
spewage was the message:
configuring IPv4 interfaces: ifconfig: hangar-queen.mit.edu: bad address
hme0.
...and some other breakage. I discovered this was because the
/etc/inet/hosts line for hangar-queen was *missing* the IP address,
the line was simply:
hangar-queen.mit.edu hangar-queen
This, in turn, was caused by a missing IP address in the /etc/athena/rc.conf
file; it had a line simply
ADDR=; export ADDR #* Internet address
So, I corrected this, and the host table, but the system *still*
wouldn't finish booting. It got into the rc.whatever stage and said:
/etc/athena/syncconf: test: argument expected
Need to reboot for configuration changes...
This ugly loop was caused by two problems:
1. syncconf writes a script, /var/athena/rc.conf.sync, that will fail
if any of the rc.conf variables is an empty string. It should wrap
quotes around the literal value of the variable in the test to prevent
this. Try setting ADDR= in rc.conf and you'll see what I mean.
2. the rc script that calls syncconf uses an exit code of 1 as the
signal to reboot -- but /bin/sh syntax errors cause an "exit 1".
Perhaps it should use a different value as the signal, since reboot
loops are annoying.
After fixing the /var/athena/rc.conf.sync script by hand, reboot worked
and the install is finished.
-- Larry
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