[3254] in testers
8.1.4 sparc: single user lossages
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Thu Jun 19 01:01:22 1997
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 01:01:14 -0400 (EDT)
To: testers@MIT.EDU
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
Thanks to Jonathon for pointing out to me just what booting the
kernel with "-b" does -- it boots in "BSD-style single user mode",
which causes /sbin/rcS to exit pretty much immediately, rather than
trying to execute the scripts in /etc/rcS.d which mount filesystems,
configure the network, etc., etc. This is very useful if either those
scripts are broken, or if your /usr filesystem will not mount.
Unfortunately, boot -b is not documented in kernel(1M). This is a Solaris
bug.
A serious problem with our configuration is that root's shell does not live on
the root partition. /bin/athena/tcsh is actualy /usr/bin/athena/tcsh, which
lives on the /usr partition. As such, on Athena suns, you cannot boot into BSD
single user mode. This means that in the event of some failure of the /usr
partition, a reinstall is necessary. This needs fixing.
While investing this, it became apparent that the init(1m) man page lies - it
claims that init invokes su(1m) after running the "sysinit" script from inittab
(i.e. /etc/rcS), however it really invokes sulogin(1m) instead. Minor
doc bug that should be fixed.
Also, strings-ing sulogin suggets it reads /etc/default/sulogin, which isn't
documented. It would be nice if these minor/doc bugs were reported
to Sun...
--jhawk
