Bleeding on the Bleeding-Edge :(
The unthinkable happened today -- My hard drive crashed! The machine stopped booting with scary looking messages I don't recall ever seeing. I looked desperately, among the randomness for a message of relief - Kernel panicked, but not even that message was to be found.
It all started soo innocently. I updated my Xgl portage tree - just like any other morning, and went about compiling the update packages. Now my machine is known to be quite buggy and reboot, especially during disk or processor intensive tasks. Overtime I've learned to live with it, blaming it on bad hardware (after all Linux is stable right!). But the random reboots were only a mere annoyance, thanks to reiser-fs the journaled filesystem, I never met with any sort of corruption -- that is until today.
I booted off a taprobane Livecd, and went about fscking the root partition. The exact command was:
After checking for over an hour, it came up with a long report that basically said, my partition was severely corrupted! It adviced me to re-run the command with the --rebuild-tree option, but the man page had some alarming text about this option:
--rebuild-tree
This option rebuilds the entire filesystem tree using leaf nodes
found on the device. Normally you only need this option if the
reiserfsck --check reports "Running with --rebuild-tree is
required". You are strongly encouraged to make a backup copy of
the whole partition before attempting the --rebuild-tree option.
Once reiserfsck --rebuild-tree is started it must finish its
work (and you should not interrupt it), otherwise the filesystem
will be left in the unmountable state to avoid subsequent data
corruptions.
So instead I decided to use the more safe --fix-fixable option which basically said to fix anything fixable. Well that wasn't enough and I did ended up running --rebuild-tree after all.
Luckily my /home partition and the smaller /boot passed with good heath after fscking them :) All seemed well now, so I rebooted as I eagerly expected things to work. It turned out I was still far from recovery.
At first I could see the kernel boot and load drivers. I immediately noticed now the sound driver was giving an error, but that didn't seem too important to worry bout. Then came the following message:
Your system seems to be missing critical device files
in /dev ! Although you may be running udev or devfs,
the root partition is missing these required files !
...
But I did see a login prompt, but supprisingly it never prompted me for the password! I couldn't login :(. So I rebooted again, this time with the Gentoo Xgl CD. Copied all the /dev files from the live cd onto the /dev directory on the hard drive.
That's when I noticed the lost+found directory. I've rarely seen this directory on a reiserfs partition (its quite common on an ext[23] partition). Surprise surprise.. there were over 3-4 dozen of files that had been recovered with the inode numbers -- pretty useless without the file names. Suddenly it occurred to me -- I might have to reinstall Gentoo, something that could take a week or more.
I rebooted to get the same message and the same login problem. I rebooted again and chrooted into the root partiton. I first ran revdep-rebuild -p to check reverse dependencies but that only came up with xterm as being broken. Trying to emerge xterm revealed another problem : the gentoo package database was inconsistent, but it told me the exact command to execute.
That came up with a list of packages that came up as corrupted. So I unmerged (removed) some and re-merged others and rebooted the system. Still had no luck, so back to the livecd. Again I chrooted to the root(/) partition and started looking at the logs which revealed more kernel drivers that have failed (acpi for example). Looks like I'll need to recompile a kernel. But that still didn't explain the login problem. Looking through the log files, one revealed the problem.
Sure enough, /bin/login was infact missing. A bit of esearching hinted pam-login was responsible for that file, so emerging it at rebooting fixed it. Phew, a sigh of relief as X-windows booted to enlightenment(e17).
I still have to recompile the kernel and stay on the lookout for other (possibly) broken packages, atleast I've save on a couple of days/weeks starting from scratch!
I guess you can't live on the bleeding edge without bleeding a little (or a lot in this case) sometimes :)
It all started soo innocently. I updated my Xgl portage tree - just like any other morning, and went about compiling the update packages. Now my machine is known to be quite buggy and reboot, especially during disk or processor intensive tasks. Overtime I've learned to live with it, blaming it on bad hardware (after all Linux is stable right!). But the random reboots were only a mere annoyance, thanks to reiser-fs the journaled filesystem, I never met with any sort of corruption -- that is until today.
The gruelling path to recovery
I booted off a taprobane Livecd, and went about fscking the root partition. The exact command was:
reiserfsck /dev/hda3
After checking for over an hour, it came up with a long report that basically said, my partition was severely corrupted! It adviced me to re-run the command with the --rebuild-tree option, but the man page had some alarming text about this option:
--rebuild-tree
This option rebuilds the entire filesystem tree using leaf nodes
found on the device. Normally you only need this option if the
reiserfsck --check reports "Running with --rebuild-tree is
required". You are strongly encouraged to make a backup copy of
the whole partition before attempting the --rebuild-tree option.
Once reiserfsck --rebuild-tree is started it must finish its
work (and you should not interrupt it), otherwise the filesystem
will be left in the unmountable state to avoid subsequent data
corruptions.
So instead I decided to use the more safe --fix-fixable option which basically said to fix anything fixable. Well that wasn't enough and I did ended up running --rebuild-tree after all.
Luckily my /home partition and the smaller /boot passed with good heath after fscking them :) All seemed well now, so I rebooted as I eagerly expected things to work. It turned out I was still far from recovery.
At first I could see the kernel boot and load drivers. I immediately noticed now the sound driver was giving an error, but that didn't seem too important to worry bout. Then came the following message:
Your system seems to be missing critical device files
in /dev ! Although you may be running udev or devfs,
the root partition is missing these required files !
...
But I did see a login prompt, but supprisingly it never prompted me for the password! I couldn't login :(. So I rebooted again, this time with the Gentoo Xgl CD. Copied all the /dev files from the live cd onto the /dev directory on the hard drive.
That's when I noticed the lost+found directory. I've rarely seen this directory on a reiserfs partition (its quite common on an ext[23] partition). Surprise surprise.. there were over 3-4 dozen of files that had been recovered with the inode numbers -- pretty useless without the file names. Suddenly it occurred to me -- I might have to reinstall Gentoo, something that could take a week or more.
Gentoo to the rescue
I rebooted to get the same message and the same login problem. I rebooted again and chrooted into the root partiton. I first ran revdep-rebuild -p to check reverse dependencies but that only came up with xterm as being broken. Trying to emerge xterm revealed another problem : the gentoo package database was inconsistent, but it told me the exact command to execute.
/usr/lib/portage/bin/fix-db.py
That came up with a list of packages that came up as corrupted. So I unmerged (removed) some and re-merged others and rebooted the system. Still had no luck, so back to the livecd. Again I chrooted to the root(/) partition and started looking at the logs which revealed more kernel drivers that have failed (acpi for example). Looks like I'll need to recompile a kernel. But that still didn't explain the login problem. Looking through the log files, one revealed the problem.
#tail -100 /var/log/auth.log
agetty[2933]: tty1: can't exec /bin/login: No such file or directory
Sure enough, /bin/login was infact missing. A bit of esearching hinted pam-login was responsible for that file, so emerging it at rebooting fixed it. Phew, a sigh of relief as X-windows booted to enlightenment(e17).
I still have to recompile the kernel and stay on the lookout for other (possibly) broken packages, atleast I've save on a couple of days/weeks starting from scratch!
I guess you can't live on the bleeding edge without bleeding a little (or a lot in this case) sometimes :)
Comments
Tried getting it into SuSE 10.1 but didn't seem very stable. Alas, I guess I get to keep firing up the Kororaa Live disc and spinning the cube....that never gets old.
And yes I too am hooked on the 3D cube and arranging my apps accordingly. The expose (F12) is also great.. just what I've been waiting for..after seeing MacosX
A much better description comes from the Free Online Dictionary which states that hypnosis is: an artificially induced state of consciousness, characterised by heightened suggestibility and receptivity to direction. So what does this mean and how can it be used to your advantage?
Well, the subject of hypnosis has been discussed and pondered since the late 1700s. Many explanations and theories have come and gone though science, however, has yet to supply a valid and well-established definition of how it actually happens. It's fairly unlikely that the scientific community will arrive at a definitive explanation for hypnosis in the near future either, as the untapped resources of our 'mostly' uncharted mind still remain something of a mystery.
However, the general characteristics of hypnosis are well documented. It is a trance state characterized by extreme suggestibility, deep relaxation and heightened imaginative functioning. It's not really like sleep at all, because the subject is alert the whole time. It is most often compared to daydreaming, or the feeling you get when you watch a movie or read a captivating book. You are fully conscious, but you tune out most of the outside world. Your focus is concentrated intensely on the mental processes you are experiencing - if movies didn't provide such disassociation with everyday life and put a person in a very receptive state then they would not be as popular (nor would TV advertising be as effective!). Have you ever stated that a film wasn't great because you just couldn't 'get into it'???
This works very simply; while daydream or watching a movie, an imaginary world becomes almost real to you because it fully engages your emotional responses. Such mental pursuits will on most occasions cause real emotional responses such as fear, sadness or happiness (have you ever cried at a sad movie, felt excited by a future event not yet taken place or shivered at the thought of your worst fear?).
It is widely accepted that these states are all forms of self-hypnosis. If you take this view you can easily see that you go into and out of mild hypnotic states on a daily basis - when driving home from work, washing the dishes, or even listening to a boring conversation. Although these situations produce a mental state that is very receptive to suggestion the most powerful time for self-change occurs in the trance state brought on by intentional relaxation and focusing exercises. This deep hypnosis is often compared to the relaxed mental state between wakefulness and sleep.
In this mental state, people feel uninhibited and relaxed and they release all worries and doubts that normally occupy their mind. A similar experience occurs while you are daydreaming or watching the TV. You become so involved in the onscreen antics