Try booting it with selinux=0 as a kernel option. See if that gets you
past the boot pause.

Michael Mansour wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a XEN guest which fails to come up.
> 
> It's no drama at this point since I had a backup of the guest, however I'd
> like to understand why it failed and has never been able to come up again. 
> 
> If possible, I'd also like to understand how to trouble-shoot such problems.
> 
> Basically, the XEN guest had a problem where the websites it was hosting
> stopped responding. Getting in via ssh I noticed a bunch of "read only
> filesystem" errors.
> 
> I rebooted it, filesystems checked ok and journals committed, but it sits at
> this point on the console:
> 
> SELinux:  Disabled at runtime.
> SELinux:  Unregistering netfilter hooks
> type=1404 audit(1248725516.191:2): selinux=0 auid=4294967295 ses=4294967295
> 
> and never brings up the login prompt.
> 
> I can issue:
> 
> xm shutdown <guest>
> 
> and it does shut itself down.
> 
> It's an SL 5.3 guest (32bit) running on an SL 5.3 host (32bit).
> 
> At the point above, no networking works so the guest is effectively cactus.
> 
> I am able to mount the img using loop back, kpartx etc and the filesystem is
> in tact, checking logs I can't see anything obvious as to why it never comes
> up. I've even tried booting into the older kernel of the guest.
> 
> This only started happening after I applied the following patches:
> 
> Jul 25 06:59:30 server yum: Updated: xulrunner-1.9.0.12-1.el5_3.i386
> Jul 25 06:59:32 server yum: Updated:
> tomcat5-servlet-2.4-api-5.5.23-0jpp.7.el5_3.2.i386
> Jul 25 06:59:48 server yum: Updated: libtiff-3.8.2-7.el5_3.4.i386
> Jul 25 06:59:59 server yum: Updated: firefox-3.0.12-1.el5_3.i386
> Jul 25 07:00:03 server yum: Updated:
> tomcat5-jsp-2.0-api-5.5.23-0jpp.7.el5_3.2.i386
> 
> Prior to that reboots would work fine.
> 
> I have several XEN guests under SL 5.3 and from the experience above I'm
> skeptical now whether I should rely on XEN outside of test environments.
> 
> What's an effective way to trouble-shoot the above type of problem to try and
> understand what is going wrong?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Michael.
> 


-- 

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Faye Gibbins, Computing Officer (Infrastructure Services)
      GeoS KB; Linux, Unix, Security and Networks.
Beekeeper  - The Apiary Project, KB -   www.bees.ed.ac.uk
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