[ILUG] md weirdness

[Niall O Broin]

On 20 Oct 2004, at 16:38, Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 04:11:38PM +0100, Niall O Broin wrote:
>> but actually, the contents of raidtab and mdadm.conf appear to be
>> academic as they don't appear to be read (looking at ls -lu) during a
>> boot.
>
> When are you doing the ls? In most setups those files get copied into
> the initrd, so the ones in /etc probably arnt what would ever be read.
> Also, initrd, and for that matter any root filesystem is usually
> mounted read-only until an init-script gets to the fstab and reliases
> to remount it rw, so attribute changes are a bad way to tell if the
> file ever got read :)

Good point that. But TBH I'd not expect this to be necessary in the 
initrd. I'm not talking about the root filesystem after all.
>
>> So, what do I have to do to get this to boot properly?
>
> Have you rebuilt the initrd?

I rebuilt the initrd BUT I didn't use the rebuilt one - having done the 
rebuild I looked at the new and old initrd files, and the difference 
was this :

backup# diff /tmp/new.ird /tmp/old.ird
34a35
 > ./lib/libc.so.6
270,271d270
< ./lib/tls
< ./lib/tls/libc.so.6

so the old one is using a special directory for libc6 for whatever 
reason.

Anyway, as there appeared to be nothing in there md related, I left 
well enough alone.

The problem was that the box was hanging at fsck time so I solved that 
sub problem by setting the fsck pass to 0 in /etc/fstab so the box will 
reboot, and I don't have to walk to the server room each time. So, now 
it comes up. However, I still can't start it until I do the  mdadm 
--assemble.


Niall