On Fri, 15 Oct 2010, Larry Linder wrote:

> A simple problem that I had done for years, turned  out to be difficult due to
> a mistake I made and what I believe is an error in the Linux OS.
> How you set it up is to forget to remove the logical drive from "/etc/fstab"
> in the past it was never a problem.

Can you explain what you mean by "logical drive".

> But in SL 5.5 it is a serious problem because during boot it can't find the
> drive name.  It drops you to a maintenance level and all you used to do in
> put in the root pass word, edit the files etc.
> What happen now:
> put in your password
> "bash  /usr/bin/id:   no such file or dir"
> "bash  [: =: unary operator expected"
> "bash  /usr/bin/id:"
> "bash [: =: unary operator expected"
> "bash /usr/bin/kpg-config: no such file or dir"
>> repair file system1
> As a result you can do nothing because your passwd has been rejected.
>
> You are back to using your install disks. It recognizes un initialized disks
> and initializes them - do a new install and set up disks and disk names and
> do not format anything, except new disk,  setup root / passwd, set up
> internet, do not install any thing.   and it knows there is an active OS
> present and the install aborts.

You could have used "rescue" mode of the install cd's to fix your issue vs 
doing a new install.

>
> The system reboots and runs normally everthing is preserved all because some
> security nit modified the code and never checked the end result.

What security code was changed?

> Sometime you can be so secure that the system becomes worthless.
>
> What used to be a simple thing of replacing disks has now been difficult at
> best.
> What I fixed is to get rid of the logical names in in the fstab and went back
> to the /dev/sda1 etc.   This was done because I didn't have a good way to
> look at disks and their names but knew the hardware.

If you mean labels then you can find filesystems label info via e2label or 
findfs .

>
> For back up on paper you need to do "df" and pipe it to lpr, keep in you file
> folder as a true back up.
>
> You can easily create this problem by simply unplugging a disk and trying a
> reboot.

Can you explain this in more detail.

>
> I have three backups but I never had a disk that was good but the electronics
> became intermittent as a function of temperature.  suspect a bad solder joint
> or circuit trace crack somewhere.   The symptom was a nice running drive that
> was sluggish.   A reboot solved the problem but the failures began to
> increase.   Users don't seem to understand a system being down.
> Some of these boxes are shut down ever six months for cleaning.
>
> Disks being cheep it time to install a new one and toss the old one.
>
> Larry Linder
>

-Connie Sieh