[Techtalk] Respawning ????

Maria Blackmore mariab at cats.meow.at
Mon Dec 9 04:58:45 EST 2002


On Sun, 8 Dec 2002, Andrew wrote:
> 	I have a newly installed Mdrk 8.0 on a P200 doing a weird thing. 
> 
> 	Message,* "init id "x" respawning to fast ; disabled for 5 minutes"*.

Hi

init has a certain set of defined things that it is supposed to keep
running.  When they stop running, init starts them again.  This is called
"respawning".  If init restarts something more than ten times in a period
of two minutes then it assumes that something is wrong with the command,
what it's doing, or some similar failure.  It will then wait five minutes
before it tries again, though this can be reduced by sending it a signal

<snip>

> Then went back to 8.0 now I get the message above. Is there a way to fix
> this?

Probably, first you have to find out what is wrong.

> Anyone care to guess what caused it.

Something has broken, in the install

> Should I just install again

Well, in the message, what is in place of the "x", or is there more than
one message with different values of "x"?

Can you get a shell (as root) on that machine?

You need to find a line starting with whatever "x" is, in the file called
/etc/inittab, eg, if "x" is "6" then look for a line starting "6:".  There
will be a command at the end of this line, this is the command that is
failing/broken.

If you can't get a shell on the machine that is afflicted by this malady,
you can always get one with appending the word "single" to whatever
bootloader is loading linux.  eg if LILO is starting the kernel with you
selecting "linuxÂ" then stop it and type "linux single", for example.

Once you know what is wrong, then you can fix it, or if sufficiently
severely broken you can reinstall it.

good luck

Maria




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