On 20 Jul 93 12:54:51 GMT, yavuz@bnr.ca (Yavuz Onder) said:

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> Hi there,

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> I hope Stephen Tweedie is reading...

Hi there! :-)

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> I have had some problems with bootutils-0.1 last night, which I would
> like to share and hopefully obtain some recommendations about:

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> First a minor point: rc file in bootutils/mount/etc could not get run
> until I added a line "#!/bin/sh" as the first line of the file.

Noted.  Whether or not this is necessary will probably depend on the
version of init you're using, but the extra line will never do any
harm so it should go in.  However, that new rc file is just intended
as an example of the kind of things you should do to your own /etc/rc,
not as a full replacement for /etc/rc.

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> When I reboot, e2fsck found some problem as I was expecting, and
> reported that "file system has changed" or something similar, and
> output the login prompt. When i attempted to login however, just after
> the message "init[1]: entering run level 6" the message "_setutent:
> can't open utmp file: no such file or directory" came up three times
> and login prompt returned. From that  point on all login attempts
> including as root failed same way.

There seem to be a number of differences in the way different
combinations of init and login react to the state of these utmp files.
I am using an older init, so you might want to check out peoigl or one
of the sysvinit packages to see if that solves any problems.

[By the way, I'd be especially interested if people could mail me to
 let me know just which combinations work with bootutils and which
 cause difficulties.]

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> When I checked (at work) the contents of the rc file I noticed two
> things: 

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> 1) There is an undocumented "-n" option, on the line mount is called
>    to remount (r/w I assume). It this to say r/w? If so the man page
>    should talk about it.

mount tries to record its activities in /etc/mtab.  It can't do this
if root is currently readonly!  The '-n' switch just disables the
writing to /etc/mtab.  You're right, it should be in the man page.

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> 2) The next line in rc removes mtab*, nologin, and utmp files of the
>    /etc. Looks like at least the last move is an overkill. If I do not
>    get any advice on this, tonight I will try to recreate that file,
>    and will see if I can login. I now understand what utmp is for, but
>    my Sparc at work does not have a nologin file, and no man page for
>    it, so I am still at dark as to nologin's function.

nologin is a file created by the shutdown program before the system is
shutdown.  If the file is present, login will refuse new logins.  So,
just before a system shuts down, new logins get disabled (but the
system remains active so that current users still get a chance to
logout cleanly).  Obviously logins must be re-enabled next time you
boot the machine, or users will get rather unhappy!

Cheers,
 Stephen.
---
Stephen Tweedie <sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk>   (JANET: sct@uk.ac.ed.dcs)
Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University, Scotland.