Re: su and chsh never work
On 30/12/99 matt garman wrote:
Yup, what you described is exactly what happened on my system. Gives
new meaning to "unstable," eh?
yeah, i was rather horrified :( especially this close to freeze, i
suppose i should get around to writing that bug report (i discovered
this after the 3rd reinstall due to some really nasty filesystem
corruption so i did not make a log or a script of everything that was
broke...)
So is there an easier fix for this? Seems as though it would take just
as long to re-install as it would to fix every little broken piece. I'm
running on a fresh install now, so if I had to throw it all away, it
wouldn't be a problem.
well, what i would do is just install the base system, then boot into
it and extract the base tarball (base2_2.tgz into /var/tmp or some
other temp directory, use the command tar -zxvpf which will properly
preserve the permissions, then just move the directories into place,
a few you will have to use some cranky commands.. you may have to
change some of this to use tar to move them if you have several
partitions..
something like this assumes you have everything on the root filesystem.
# cd /
# mv sbin sbin.stupid
# mv /var/tmp/sbin /
# mv bin bin.stupid
# /bin.stupid/mv /var/tmp/bin /
# mv usr usr.stupid
# mv /var/tmp/usr /
and so on, do /dev last and then immediately reboot (i had a few
things getting confused when i moved /dev out of the way.
another faster and more adventurous way would be to try:
# cd /
# tar -zxvpf base2_2.tgz
which in theory will blow away the current broken base system with a
properly extracted version but i have not tried this and it may cause
unexpected results... one thing for sure is it would probably revert
to unconfigured and you would have to do the `configure the base
system' step manually that is normally done by dbootstrap.
another option would be to boot dbootstrap and when you get to the
point of install the base system go to VT2 start a shell and extract
the base tarball yourself, but tar is not available on the boot
floppies and afaict neither is cpio, you can however copy the tar
binary to a floppy disk, mount the floppy and invoke tar manually.
this is probably the best option.. after you extract it yourself go
back to dbootstrap and skip the install base system and go to
configure base system.
i have not tried that either but it SHOULD work ;-) I know for
sure tar works since i have done that before (don't worry about
removing the root floppy its not used anymore after the kernel gets
done decompressing it)
if you have not blown away the broken base yet it might be useful to
do a ls -laR / > /tmp/ls.out so the developers can be shown exactly
what is screwed, rather then my not that great description of it all.
--
Ethan Benson
To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/
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