[Savannah-hackers-public] Planning Savannah kernel boot check

[Sylvain Beucler]

Hi,

The other day I wanted to boot on a Debian kernel from backports.org
and Savannah didn't reboot (ward was altered because of the downtime).

The system stopped at the initrd phase with an error message too long
to catch on the virtual console (and didn't appear in dmesg).

This may be related to RAID - see below my ChangeLog entry.


I would like to plan a time to check on this issue more carefully when
you happen to be at Quincy - possibly with somebody in front of the
screen.
Can we plan that?

I mentioned this to jag who asked to send mail to sysadmin@ to ease
the organisation.

Thanks,


        * Installed VServer 2.6.22 kernel from backports.org - since I'm
        the only one to compile the kernels, it's not a safe situation. If
        need arises to manually build a kernel again, I stored all the
        .config we've got in infra/linux-kernel.config/ . Note: the new
        kernel has a dependency on udev, which was thus installed.

        * Unfortunately this Debian kernel fails to load: with
        AUTOSTART=false (previous configuration) in /etc/default/mdadm,
        /home cannot be loaded:

        ---
        
        Assembling MD arrays...done (disabled in /etc/default/mdadm).           
       
        Will now check all file systems.                                        
        
        fsck 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)                                             
        
        Checking all file systems.                                              
        
        [/sbin/fsck.ext2 (1) -- /boot] fsck.ext2 -a -C0 /dev/md0                
    
        fsck.ext2: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/md0      
    
        /dev/md0:                                                               
        
        The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2    
        
        filesystem.  If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2      
        
        filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock 
        
        is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate 
superblock:     
            e2fsck -b 8193 <device>                                             
    
                                                                                
        
        fsck died with exit status 8                                            
    
        * File system check failed.                                          
        A log is being saved in /var/log/fsck/checkfs if that location is 
writable.
        Please repair the file system manually.                             
        * A maintenance shell will now be started.                              
   
        CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and resume system boot.             
   
        Give root password for maintenance                      
        (or type Control-D to continue):         

        ---

        and when AUTOSTART=true, we're stuck in initrd, and dmesg|more
        doesn't help. I set GRUB's default to the previous kernel, we'll
        do other experiments some other time. Possibly try to make
        /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf match the output of 'mdadm --examine
        --verbose --scan'

        Also, with AUTOSTART=true, /dev/md2 was not detected, but could by
        running deprecated 'mdrun'. I also got a weird error from VServer
        when 'vserver cvs enter': "openpty(): No such file" which normally
        indicates that there's a problem with the guest's /dev/pts (we
        already have it mounted).

-- 
Sylvain