rescue chroot

Occasionally a machine won't boot well. When chrooting in a rescue environment the following commands are useful


mount --bind /proc /CurrentMountPointofRootPartition/proc
mount --bind /dev /CurrentMountPointofRootPartition/dev
mount --bind /sys /CurrentMountPointofRootPartition/sys

dying hardware

The hardware in the hawkins lab is dying. One machine H32 lost its hard drive. As the machines are out of warranty CMS did what they could and found another old drive. The problem is that, that drive may also be bad. I get an error when formatting the hard drive for the operating system. Running badblocks on it now.

possible network issue

In the redcay lab 3 of the 6 machines were stuck booting up. They were complaining about networking errors, but didn't get any further, not even timing out. After 3 hours of trying to find what was happening, they started working again. No changes had been made to the software. Early on I actually had ruled out networking, since that was my first suspicion, but I had swapped the cable with an adjacent working one, and it still misbehaved.

The only other thing that I did to two of them is boot them up with a rescue cd and manually configure the networking.

The other problem is that Pam was refusing local logins because it couldn't contact the ldap server. It is unclear to me what the problem is in the configuration files.