[ILUG] md weirdness

Colm MacCarthaigh colm at stdlib.net
Wed Oct 20 17:39:32 IST 2004


On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 05:29:31PM +0100, Niall O Broin wrote:
> >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.

Debian does all of the md stuff in an initrd anyway these days :)

> >>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.

Hmm that's odd, the initrd should include all of the modules for the new
2.6 kernel, which would be a big difference. Did you build it using
"mkinitrd -o /wherever/you/keep/your/initrd /lib/modules" ?

> 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.

Hmmmm, is raidtools (or raidtools2) still hanging around? It and mdadm
might be having a tiff.

-- 
Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net



More information about the ILUG mailing list