On Sat, 23 Aug 1997, Craig Sanders wrote:
> 'single' still has many daemon processes running - you can do some > repair or maintainence work in single mode but you can't safely do an > fsck because the disks are mounted rw. > > some other tasks (like moving a filesystem from one partition to > another) are also best done when there are no daemons running. > > e.g. moving /var or /var/spool to another disk or partition while > daemons that use that filesystem are running (for example syslogd, > sendmail, innd, squid, and many others) is not a good idea. The only > way to be sure that you have correctly transferred all of the data is > to be sure that nothing is running which can change it while it's being > copied. Thank you for the instructive explanation Craig. These things should be written down in a place where it is easy to find for the panic-struck newbie (somewhere on the debian website?) Actually I find the best way to do all kinds of low-level (and/or emergency) work to boot an entirely separate spare installation. On a 2500 MB harddisk it is easy to spare 40 MB for that purpose. In that space you can put a lot more tools than would ever fit on the rescue diskette. I added the partition and the kernel on it to /etc/lilo.conf, but in regard of the purpose of the rescue partition I also made a seperate bootdiskette for booting it. > > As a minor matter, typing ``linux emergency'' did not work. I was > > able to get on. Even though I was supposedly root, however, I was > > told that all my files were read-only, so I could not change. > > that is because the root filesystem was mounted read-only. this is not a > bug, it's a feature. > > you should have seen a message on the screen (just before the root > password prompt) which told you that the root partition was mounted > read-only and that you could remount it read-write by typing: > > mount -n -o rw,remount / > > i find it's useful to also run: > > mount /proc > open > open > open > > before doing anything else. the /proc filesystem is so that you can get > PIDs of running tasks (so you can run "kill" or "killall" for example > - which is useful sometimes), and the "open"s are so that you have a > few spare virtual consoles to do stuff in if required. when booted in > emergency mode, ^C doesn't work to kill processes. setting it with stty > doesn't fix it either. You have to install the package "open" to be able to use it. It is an optional package: </home/joost>$ dpkg -s open Package: open Status: install ok installed Priority: optional Section: admin Installed-Size: 29 Maintainer: Dominik Kubla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Version: 1.4-1 Depends: libc5 (>= 5.4.0-0) Conflicts: kbd (<< 0.92-1) Description: start a program on a new virtual terminal (VT) Open opens a new vt and runs a command on it. It can be used as a simple way to start several console logins without having to type your passwd on each VT in turn. open can be used as a simpler to use replacement for the doshell(8) command. . open is similar in functionality to the AIX/RS6000 command of the same name. Joost -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
