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Re: runlevels [was: fried(?) computer hangs on boot]



Vikki Roemer wrote:

Kent West wrote:

Try "apt-get --reinstall install anacron".



Well, I would, but I can't log in. I have it booting up now, I get a login prompt, it'll accept my username, but it hangs trying to authenticate my password. Do you think this is a problem with login (I think that's the program), or whatever file the passwords are stored in? The passwords aren't stored in /etc/passwd because they're encrypted-- I know that much. And I tried logging in as both root and as a normal user and both logins are hung.

And, AFAIK, only 3 programs (so far) are seriously damaged: anacron, cron, and fetchmail-- those were the ones that were hanging on boot up. As for those other errors above, I assume that in single-user mode, nice doesn't work (same as ctrl-z) and neither does networking.

Temporarily deactivate those programs, and then boot normally. Then you can reinstall them.

There are several ways to deactivate those apps. Probably what I'd do is to stick a line as the first executable line in each script that says "exit 0". For example, /etc/init.d/cron would become:

#!/bin/sh
# Start/stop the cron daemon.
exit 0
test -f /usr/sbin/cron || exit 0

Then after the problems are fixed you can remove that line.

I'd recommend you respond to the list rather than to me, in case I tell you something wrong, or others need to clarify things, or I don't know the answer, as well as to provide a record in the archives in the event someone in the future has a similar problem.


Oops, sorry, I thought I had. Mozilla is driving me nuts because it doesn't have a "reply to list" feature like mutt does. :(


I do "Reply to All" and then manually remove the original poster. It's a pain . . . .


--
Kent




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