[Nottingham] ironic Xserver failure

[Peter Chang]

On Thu, 5 Aug 2004, David Wolfson wrote:

> 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!

You need to do a systematic check find the reason(s) for the box's
failure. Check the logs for kernel messages, security messages,
etc. You've got to find out if it's down to hardware or cracking.

> 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.

Could be a hard drive partial failure, memory corruption or power supply
problem. If so, get your configuration and data off and backed up asap!

> 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.

How about using the actual X logs to find out why it's failing?

> 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.

Is your font server running? Are the font directories populated? Is the
font cache in a coherent state?

> 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.

Well, if you're going the Microsoft way, you could forcibly reinstall the
X server and its supporting parts.

> The really odd thing is that this process managed to use the GUIs,
> having sucessfully used X!

That's not surprising. It's a client/server system. It's just your server
that's not working.

> 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!).

It's not too bad at the moment...

Peter


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