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

[Raven, corporate courtesan]

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.  The problem was that the machine (very recently rebuilt with
a net-install of whatever the latest Red Hat is) was being SYN-flooded
by a script kiddie.  Kai tried to reboot it, and the reboot froze while
unmounting filesystems and killing processes.  So he hard-powered it
off.  When it came back up, this is what happened...

----- Forwarded message from Kai -----

During bootup, I see:

INIT: Version 2.78 booting

               Welcome to Red Hat Linux!
         Press "I" to enter interactive startup

Mounting proc filesystem:                       [  OK  ]
INIT: Entering runlevel 3ers:
Updating /etc/fstab execvp: No such file or directory
INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: No more processes left in this runlevel.

Five minutes later, of course, the six "respawning too fast lines
reappear.

The line about "entering runlevel3ers" looks almost like something
ending in "ers" shows up first, then gets the INIT message superimposed
over it, but it happens too fast for me to read.

Google shows that lots of other people have had this problem, asked
about it on mailing lists, and not always even received a response. But
I'll keep looking.  (As you might guess, this is not the first time this
week I've Goggle-searched this string.)

Thanks for any help. 

	[Raven:  I told him to boot off a boot floppy and fsck the
drives, to see if that improved matters.  We also tried a hard
sync;sync;halt.  And then...]

Subject: Tried fsck'ing it...

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 -----

	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.

	Any help gratefully passed on to Kai.  Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Raven

"Incoming packet over rabbit. SYN."
"Incoming packet over duck. quACK!"
  -- me and Tiff, flinging stuffed animals and tech humor