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Date:      Fri, 10 Nov 2000 20:57:16 +1100 (EST)
From:      Stanley Hopcroft <Stanley.Hopcroft@IPAustralia.Gov.AU>
To:        FreeBSD-Questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        Carl Makin <Carl.Makin@IPAustralia.Gov.AU>
Subject:   4.1-RELEASE. panic. I'm not going anywhere without my init.
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0011102035140.220-100000@stan.aipo.gov.au>

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Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am writing to ask for your comments on the following badness :-

. lpr ceased to work from the command line of an xterm (trace shows the
lpr client sending the P command but sending no data; interestingly
enough Netscape could still use lpr to print HTML with ghostcript). It
may well have also failed from the console.

There were no signs of problems in dmesg, o /var/log/lpd-errors, or
/varr/log/messages.

. reboot (several) shows normal device probes, file system checks but
then panics with 

init signal 6 exit 0
panic: I'm not goiing anywhere without my init
rebooting in 10 seconds ....

After booting the system with the live File System CD (thank you
CDROM.COM, thank you), and mounting the root file system of the defunct
4.1-R system, I had a look at init.

It was there and it looked fine.

Copying init from the 4.0-RELEASE system (the only live file system I
had), enabled the system to boot (and print with lpr)

Please would you consider commenting on 

. was there any relationship between the problem with lpr  and the boot
failure (perhaps I ought to drag out the McKusick et al)

. why on earth would init call abort() (the origin of the SIGABRT) ?

. if init became "damaged", how could that happen - there's no sign of
problems reported by fsck /

. is anything else likely to be "damaged". Should I reinstall - this is
a desktop, so the cost is not great ?

For what it's worth, this system is a personal desktop that runs kde
1.1.2, navigator 4.72, quite a few rxvts and ktelnet sesssions, and
Citrix Metaframe (Linux client). It does all this with a P5 166 Mhz
CPU, 32MB of RAM, and ~ 1GB IDE (1 MB S3 graphics for the video
connisseurs)

It's slow but reliable and stable.

I am really pleased that when the machine failed, I did not have to
reinstall or do the usual MS stuff (format reload , do it a few more
times until it works.)

As should be failrly obvious, I know very little about Unix; however
such is the simple yet robust structure of the system that it's easy to
fix and diagnose. 

Has anywone in the history of computing known of MS systems being
repaired ?

It is wonderful having a system that is such a good friend: reliable to
the point of being faithful, obedient and helpful.

Thank you,

Yours sincerely,

S Hopcroft

IP Australia. 



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