[Nottingham] LILO troubles

[Johannes Kling]

Hello,

  I stumbled across a LiLo problem again that left me completely
lost:

On a RedHat Enterprise box, running lilo (version is 21.4-4) produces
absolutely no output, but returns success (0) nonetheless. When run
with -v it prints it's version and a copyright notice about the
"lba32" extensions and then quits. An strace reveals that it is
actually reading the lilo.conf, then opens /dev/md0 (it's a RAID
setup), but after two calls to ioctl on it, it just closes:

# strace lilo
execve("/sbin/lilo", ["lilo"], [/* 24 vars */]) = 0
uname({sys="Linux", node="h226.lon-b.4surehosting.net", ...}) = 0
brk(0)                                  = 0x8059000
old_mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb75ea000
open("/etc/ld.so.preload", O_RDONLY)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY)      = 3
fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=33845, ...}) = 0
old_mmap(NULL, 33845, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0xb75e1000
close(3)                                = 0
open("/lib/tls/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY)    = 3
read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0\3\0\1\0\0\0PX\1\000"..., 512) = 512
fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=1567768, ...}) = 0
old_mmap(NULL, 1275852, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0xb74a9000
old_mmap(0xb75db000, 12288, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED, 3, 0x131000) = 0xb75db000
old_mmap(0xb75de000, 10188, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb75de000
close(3)                                = 0
set_thread_area({entry_number:-1 -> 6, base_addr:0xb75eab40, limit:1048575, seg_32bit:1, contents:0, read_exec_only:0, limit_in_pages:1, seg_not_present:0, useable:1}) = 0
munmap(0xb75e1000, 33845)               = 0
brk(0)                                  = 0x8059000
brk(0x807a000)                          = 0x807a000
brk(0)                                  = 0x807a000
open("/etc/lilo.conf", O_RDONLY)        = 3
fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0600, st_size=488, ...}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb75e9000
read(3, "prompt\ntimeout=50\ndefault=linux\n"..., 4096) = 488
fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0600, st_size=488, ...}) = 0
open("/dev/md0", 0x4)                   = 4
fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFBLK|0660, st_rdev=makedev(9, 0), ...}) = 0
ioctl(4, 0x80480911, 0xbfffd210)        = 0
ioctl(4, 0x80140912, 0xbfffd1f0)        = 0
exit_group(0)                           = ?

---

I'd like to say "I googled and...", but I'm really not sure where to
start looking for the problem here. Has anybody here come across
something like this before?

Regards,
  Jo