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  • From: evraire AT tuwg.com
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [SM-Discuss] Dark tale
  • Date: 31 Oct 2002 15:29:08 -0000

I guess it's appropriate that this happened on Halloween, but I wanted to
share my latest horror story. (Someone else did the same recently and I
thought it was cool to read. :) Unfortunately, it's very long: I tend to do
that when I start writing. :)

First, I'd just like to say I learned my lesson: NEVER do an unnatended
"sorcery rebuild"!!!

So here goes... I've been getting these little fidgety problems on and off
resulting in an environment which is much less stable than Linux should be.
For instance, I tried using gaim, but everytime I would add a user it would
crash. I tried using EveryBuddy, but it would never receive events.
Yesterday for some reason everytime I used Galeon to fill out form
information it would crash on sending.

Now, I've very recently started building my system from scratch. About two
weeks ago I popped in the "secret" 1001 ISO and, with a lot of help from
Dufflebunk (thanks!) I finally got a working sorcery with an up-to-date
grimoire! Satisfied, I went along my happy way installing everything from
Gnome2 to ssh. Never did I rebuild, too weary of what would happen.
(Especially since there were still issues with dependancies, before sorcery
0.9 came out.)

Last night, I was tired of all these little problems. Afterall, if I wanted
such an unstable environment, I would just run Wintendo! I finally decided
it was time for a sorcery rebuild. So I started by running a "cast fix",
then once that was completed I did a "sorcery rebuild".

Of course, I'm not that trusting to believe everything would go perfectly
smoothly, especially with all the glibc talk that's been going on in the
list, so I dilligently edit the queue removing the candidates for what I
thought were the more nasty problems should they fail. With this, I started
the long procedure of a "sorcery rebuild".

Sorcery was happily chugging along in a window when my girlfriend started
pestering me to go to bed. Everything seemed fine and I had removed the
worse of the bunch from the queue, so I sighed, turned off the monitor and
headed for bed.

Then Halloween arrived...

Now I've been sick lately, so I woke up around 2am with a coughing fit.
Feeling bad for waking up my girlfriend and keeping her up, I decided to
leave the bedroom 'til it passed. Having nothing better to do, I strolled up
to the computer (like any good geek would :) to see how things were coming
along. I turned on my monitor and was horrified!!! From then on, my
coughing didn't seem to bother me so much.

The screensaver was on, but the system was frozen up SOLID!!! No numlock, no
mouse, no CTL-ALT-DEL, CTL-ALT-BS, CTL-ALT-ESC... NOTHING! I couldn't see
any other choice: I hit the reset button and prayed.

Much as I feared, rather than booting into my gorgeous graphical GDM greeter,
the horrible red [FAILED] messages started scrolling by and I watched as
ReiserFS recovered links (good thing I'm using a journaled filesystem!) until
Linux finally dropped me to a login prompt. "It's not so bad" I remember
thinking to myself, "at least I have a login prompt and no kernel panic!"

Throwing caution to the wind, I logged in as root. The first thing I did was
check the /var/log/sorcery/activity to see what succeeded and what failed. I
was scrolling down the list and much to my surprised, it looked like most
everything had succeeded and what failed were for obvious reasons (like
missing source file). Then BAM!!! The last few lines of the log where filed
with '@' characters in reverse color. "That can't be good" I said to no one
in the room.

This may sound stupid, but given the recent thread on glibc, I decided to run
ldconfig with no change.

I tried a "cast --fix", but that did nothing obvious. Since I was up, I
decided I'd do another "sorcery rebuild", sticking around this time to see
where things went to hell, but then it occured to me one of those blood red
[FAILED] meant my network was down. A quick "ifconfig" showed this was the
case. I had put the "linux" spell on hold (and manually removed it from the
queue... what the hell?) but I decided to make sure my module was still
there... it was! I knew it wouldn't work, but I wanted to see what it said
so I did "modprobe via-rhine" and, instead of the expected unresolved
symbols, I see a pile of text.

Now remember, I'm coughing my head off and it's like 2:30 in the morning, so
it took me awhile before I realized it was snippets (comments to be more
precise) from a source file. There was a name there (something Owens), and
using my laptop I was able to discover he was responsible for some kernel
related stuff and modutils related stuff. Doing an lsmod gave me the same
result (at the time I didn't realize most of these commands were symlinks to
insmod. :) I realized modutils was screwed.

Having no network, I popped in the 1001 ISO and rebooted. Thank God I've got
that one because it uses the same kernel as me (2.4.19)! I copied over what
I thought were the necessary binaries to get modutils running again (making a
backup of mine, just in case). I tried "modprobe via-rhine" again: SUCCESS!
I was thrilled! I tried to "cast modutils" to get my own copy running again
and right away it complained about the "ps" command not being found. I
CTL-C'd out of the compilation, copied over /bin/ps and libproc-whatever.so
tried it again: success! I had my own copy of modutils running again.

Realizing how important modutils really is now, I thought that maybe fixing
it might alleviate a lot of problems, so I typed "shutdown -r now", popped
out the CD and crossed my fingers. At best, I was hoping to see a lot less
[FAILED] messages and getting back the prompt to further fix up my system,
but to my ecstatic surprise my beautiful GDM returned! I quickly logged in
as my normal user and everything seemed normal once again.

Deciding to wait 'til I could monitor the PC before doing another "sorcery
rebuild", I shut down the PC and went to bed close to 3am satisfied. I
realized how, had the same happened under Wintendo, it most certainly
would've meant a complete reinstallation. I also thought about sorcery and
how, being implemented in bash, it was so easy to use to fix my system. I
also realized how Linux can usually be fixed no matter what happens.

I'm still not sure what caused the original crash (I'm starting to suspect
hardware though), and I've still got this mysterious "win" file appearing on
my gnome-desktop everytime I log in, but at least I have a running system.
Here are some lessons I learned in less than an hour:

1) as I said before, NEVER do a "sorcery rebuild" unnattended, much less a
"sorcery system-update"!

2) because SourceMage relies on the Net so much, it makes sense to compile
your network driver directly in the kernel. This is what I had before, but
the new networking scripts didn't support this well so I switched to the
module. This should be fixed in the neworking scripts.

3) ALWAYS have an ISO nearby, especially one with the same kernel as you're
running. It will certainly be nice when the RC1 ISO is released (and I hope
this one works with USB keyboards ;)

Anyway, is anyone still reading this? I hope you didn't find my scary
story too boring. :) (It was scary to me anyway :) Sorry for the long post!

Jonathan Evraire
evraire at tuwg.com

PS: this may have something to do with bug 1523, since the first nano that
pops up doesn't accept any input and needs to be killed, although I don't see
how this could freeze the rest of the system.




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  • [SM-Discuss] Dark tale, evraire, 10/31/2002

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