[Techtalk] Tried fsck'ing it... (fwd)

[hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 01:22:29PM -0500 or thereabouts, Raven, corporate courtesan wrote:
> Heya --
> 	Forwarded on behalf of Kai MacTane.  Unfortunately, the machine
> thrashing here is his mail server, which is why Kai can't speak for
> himself.  I've tried everything I can think of for low-level system
> recovery.
[Kai:]
> It now does: Mounting proc filesystem, configuring kernel parameters,
> setting hardware clock, entering runlevel 3... and then gives the same
> problem. (Also, I note that "configuring kernel parameters" ends with
> "ers", and in about the right place. So that's probably waht was getting
> masked earlier.)
> 
> More Google searching says the Ids 1-6 are probably the initial
> (min)gettys loaded by inittab; they're probably aborting too fast
> because some library is hosed. Which would probably mean I'd have to
> reinstall completely unless I can figure out which one.
> 
> Help?
> ----- End forwarded message -----

If someone was actually attacking the machine, did they get in and
do something seriously unpleasant which is causing some of this?

I gather that you can tell lilo (or grub, if this is a recent RH)
to boot to a shell. I don't know how to do it in grub though. This
is not the same one as "linux single"; it's the "linux init=/bin/sh"
one.

If you can get that far, you can check with rpm -Va what's intact.
If nothing is, I don't know what you do then. Sorry :) But I suppose
if the shell works, at least some of it is working.

> 	I know that journaling filesystems are supposed to be superior
> at this sort of error handling, but the machine in question is a P-133
> with 64 megs of RAM.  Can that handle ReiserFS or ext3?  Would those
> save him from similar horror stories in the future?  He *just* spent
> three days rebuilding this box; he'll reinstall it again if necessary,
> but wants to make sure that if he does that, he won't have this same
> problem again if the box suddenly loses power.

I have a Cyrix MediaGX which now has 96Mb but used to have 32Mb.
It has RH 7.2 and thus ext3, and it is absolutely fine. We had a 
series of power outages when we had builders in the house. I was
sooo grateful for ext3 then! 

I believe Alan has RH 7.2 on a 20Mb 486 (given the amount of memory 
the installer likes, I am not quite sure how, mind you) and that ext3
is quite happy.

Telsa