Debian saves the day... again.
Hi Folks,
Just a little story that I thought might amuse people.
I've come to the realisation that a debain rescue disk is every bit as
essential for an aspiring linux trouble-shooter as a DOS system disk
with cd-rom drivers and Norton Disk Doctor is for the Windoze variety of
hacker.
We have a RedHat 4.2 machine running on our small ISP which handles
dial-up PPP (via mgetty) and and email (via qmail), which generally
works quite nicely. At about 4am last night, however, it 'died in the
arse', for want of a better description - just completely froze. At
about 12 noon today I got a call from the very stressed sysop, who asked
me, in the nicest way possible, to get my arse over there and fix it.
After a bit of stuffing around I realise, yes, it was stuffed. It was
freezing regularly on boot, which lead me to believe that it was one of
the services that it was starting that was the problem. Booting into
single user mode, I eventually identified the network as the problem,
but in order to work this out, the machine froze lots of times when I
was investigating, and only a hard reboot would get it running.
Unfortunately, as we all know, filesystems that are not cleanly
unmounted have a tendency to get hosed. I experienced this first-hand
today when fsck started complaining loudly. Fsck glared at me and told
me that I could enter the root password, or press CTL-D to continue
booting.
Entering the root password did nothing appreciable, and CTL-D only
rebooted the system. Nothing I was able to do got me out of this
viscious circle.
I tried my trust RedHat rescue disk, but that didn't seem to want to
play, although I don't know why. Then I had a sudden flash of inspiration,
and grabbed the InfoMagic CDs and made myself up a bo rescue disk.
I booted with the bo disk, ATL'd to the included ash shell, manually ran
fsck, and un-hosed the disk holding the root file system.
I rebooted, to make sure it worked (it did), then changed the network
card, and last time I checked (not long ago), it was still chuffing
along nicely.
The moral of the story: Don't leave home without your rescue disk and
Debain will probably save your day too!
damon
--
Damon Muller | Did a large procession wave their torches
(damon@empire.net.au) | As my head fell in the basket,
Network Administrator | And was everyone dancing on the casket...
EmpireNET | - TBMG, "Dead"
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