Re: segmentation fault?? and fsck problems.

["L. C. Robinson" <lcr@draken.localnet>]

Did you use the "-o remount,ro" option to "mount", to remount root?
Thus:
mount -n -o remount,ro /
(taken from the /etc/rc.d/init.d/halt script).
Note that after the remount, the mount command will not report
the read only status correctly; I check by trying to create a file
or remove a temporary one.

But this is a hard way to do things, and I never fsck the filesystems
this way, except under very unusual circumstances.  Fscking
automatically during bootup is the natural way to do it, if you
have set things properly for this.  Read the tune2fs man page
for info on how to make this happen every two weeks or so (time
set by you).

Now, I know you said that the boot time checks are not available
to you, but I don't see why.  The checks are initiated
automatically, and any problems found are repaired automatically,
so you probably don't need to see what is happening.  I am
sighted, so I suppose there might be some subtlety here, that
would get by me.  I can think of a way that this could be
automated by changing to, say, init state 9 (normally not used),
and modifying the "halt" and /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit scripts to do
this for you, without completing a full shutdown, and then going
back to init state 3.  Another way to do it would be to add the
above quoted mount command to the /etc/rc.d/init.d/single script,
just before the last 3 lines, and then do the fsck manually,
after doing a "telinit 1", followed by a "telinit 3".  Red Hat's
single user scripts in the past have been broken though, for any
practical use that I know of, so I don't know what problems you
might run into, and if screader, etc, would work normally in that
limited environment.  It might be easier to modify the rc.sysinit
script to use screader during bootup, or to log the results of
the fsck for later inspection.

I wonder if Red Hat would be willing to make accessibility
modifications of this kind?  If anyone is interested in this,
feel free to forward this message to them.  If they (Red Hat) are
interested in including accessibility modifications in their
standard distribution, I'd be willing to try to modify things so
as to log the results of the fsck (probably to a floppy, since
other filesystems are not available for writing during a fsck),
and forward the modifications to them.  I already have hacked an
improved bootup package, based on Red Hat, that logs most other
stuff for daemon startup, and avoids the cryptic clutter on the
bootup screen (prominent warnings are given of any failures).
Blind users could activate this kind of thing by booting up in,
say, init state 8 or 9, which would be a modified version of
init 3 (the normal text state).


On Tue, 9 Jun 1998, John Covici wrote:

> on Mon, 8 Jun 1998 14:28:03 -0600 (MDT) "L. C. Robinson" <lcr@draken.localnet> in
> <Pine.LNX.3.95.980608135705.20356A-100000@draken.localnet> wrote:
> >When you fsck the filesystem, are you doing it on a read-write mounted
> >filesystem?  This will lead to more damage, and should _never_ be
> >done.  What procedures do you use to fsck your filesystem?  
> 
> This brings up an interesting point -- once I am logged in I cannot
> get the root file system into readonly mode, I worked around things by
> stopping all loggers and lpd, cron and a couple of other things, but
> when ever I tried to get it into read only mode it said device or
> resource busy.
> 
> I am still using screader, any way to work around this -- the boot
> time checks are of course not available to me.
> 
> Any comments welcome on this -- luckily for me the fsck's have not
> revealed any errors.

-- 
L. C. Robinson
reply to infynity@cyberhighway.net (a family account)