[Nottingham] ironic Xserver failure

[David Wolfson]

yup.  it had to happen the day after the 'disaster recovery' talk... we have a dead(ish) box.  It appeared to get hung after using 'nohup', but I'm sure it's something far more sinister than that!  

The syptoms we're users not being able to log in, and various 'no gos' on print jobs and the like, leading to hitting the reset button.  At the suggstion of the reboot process I ran a verification test of '/' which found MULTIPLE bad/cloned blocks (this has happened before, but never this many and has always recovered).  I ran fdsk (?) and copied all the clone blocks.  

After an automatic reboot, it got as far as a login prompt, at which point X normally starts up with a login window.  At this point it seemed to try and reboot the Xserver several times before bringing up a series of windows showing xlog files and giving the option to run xconfiguration as root.  As you have probably guessed by now, this didn't work.  I'm able to get a prompt either on the box itself, or via ssh.  By ftp'ing file across ssh I've been able to have a look at the config file (and the config.backup file that usefully appeared to be identical) and log file and it looks as though it's struggling to find fonts.

So my question is, how do I reconfigure the Xserver?  I've been trying all afternoon, so far with no luck.  I thought I was onto a winner when I tried to 'upgrade' the OS selecting all the X options, but still no luck.  The really odd thing is that this process managed to use the GUIs, having sucessfully used X!

I'm about ready to throw in the towel and go home to drink tea in front of the dead sky box (blues screens are so soothing!).  

Any help to the usual please :-S

Dave


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