From owner-freebsd-current Sun Mar 4 13:13:43 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from feral.com (feral.com [192.67.166.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9A87837B718; Sun, 4 Mar 2001 13:13:40 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mjacob@feral.com) Received: from beppo (beppo [192.67.166.79]) by feral.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA31918; Sun, 4 Mar 2001 13:13:42 -0800 Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2001 13:13:36 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Jacob Reply-To: mjacob@feral.com To: Mike Smith Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: well! That root didn't work! Let's try another! In-Reply-To: <200103042113.f24LDpj02261@mass.dis.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sun, 4 Mar 2001, Mike Smith wrote: > > > > This happened to me yesterday, and, haha, I didn't notice until I started to > > see RSA stuff not working: > > > > da0: 40.000MB/s transfers (20.000MHz, offset 8, 16bit), Tagged Queueing > > Enabled > > da0: 4340MB (8888924 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 553C) > > Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad0a > > no such device 'ad' > > setrootbyname failed > > ffs_mountroot: can't find rootvp > > Root mount failed: 6 > > Mounting root from ufs:da0a > > da0: invalid primary partition table: no magic > > WARNING: clock lost 358 days -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE! > > > > > > My FreeBSD-alpha PC164 lost it's IDE disk for 4.2 somehow- which I'd just > > loaded the 4.2 kernel from- so it decided to run off of da0 instead, which was > > -current. Truly a startling turn of events. Shouldn't one stop and ask if the > > root one asked for isn't available? > > There are two schools of thought here. One says "you should try very > hard to find a root device", the other says "you should boot only from > the exactly correct root device and complain otherwise". I took the > first approach because its advocates shouted more loudly than those of > the second. > > Would a louder warning message be enough of a compromised? Actually, no. I think very strongly that you shouldn't always look that hard automatically- you should look hard to find reasonable choices (you could say, da2, 7 and 9 have what *appear* to be filesystems I can use)- but you shouldn't just launch onto them- vital customer data corruption can result. This might also be the source of the 'going nowhere without my init' install failures that so plague alphas? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message