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#1 2003-12-06 03:40:03

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Absolutely Mystified

I'm trying to install Arch from the install CD on a machine I will be using as a webserver and have run into a problem booting that I can't solve. Its not as though I have no experience with the Arch installation process, I've successfully installed it on three workstations on my network. Here's the error I'm getting:

VFS: Cannot open root device "discs/disc0/part3" or 00:00
Please append correct root= option
Kernel panic: Unable to mount root fs on 00:00

As far as I know, I have made no mistakes configuring the kernel either respecting the enabling of important file systems or in any other way. I've done nothing different with the kernel here than I've done on my workstations. I'd had Gentoo on this machine before trying to do this install and had no such problems. I can find nothing helpful on our forum or the Gentoo forum or by googling. I've tried naming root= everything in the book to get it to work and I'm completely out of ideas. Relevant portions of /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst follow:

Bottom of /etc/fstab ...

/dev/discs/disc0/part2   swap   swap      defaults   0   0
/dev/discs/disc0/part3   /         reiserfs   defaults   0   0

Boot Section of /boot/grub/menu.lst ...

title  Arch Linux  [/boot/vmlinuz
root  (hd0,2)
kernel  /boot/vmlinuz  root=/dev/discs/disc0/part3

Grub is installed to / and is booted by a boot manager as it is on all the other machines. The hardware on this box includes a Promise IDE Controller so as to handle an ATA 100 hard drive. Other than that, there's nothing at all out of the ordinary. Could I be missing enabling something in the kernel?  I had no trouble on this machine configuring and compiling the kernel when I installed Gentoo and no such errors. I'm lost and would appreciate some ideas.

jlowell

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#2 2003-12-06 13:26:06

zen_guerrilla
Member
From: Greece
Registered: 2002-12-22
Posts: 259

Re: Absolutely Mystified

Make sure you compiled your ide-controller & reiserfs *in* the kernel, not as modules.

btw. does it boot with the default AL kernel ?

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#3 2003-12-07 01:54:49

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Absolutely Mystified

zen_gorilla,

Truth be known, I've never done anything special to accomodate the IDE controller when configuring a kernel for this box with any distro I've ever used on it. I've simply left the IDE/ATA/ATAPI part of things in its natural state.  And I always build items into the kernel, never use modules.

I wiped the drive clean and reinstalled, this time using the stock Arch IDE kernel as you suggested, and get exactly the same result, word for word! There is something odd going on here. I had Gentoo on this machine; I wanted to replace it with Arch and to make it into a webserver but if I can't, I'll have to reinstall Gentoo. I'm stumped.

Any more thoughts?

jlowell

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#4 2003-12-07 21:56:10

andy
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2002-10-11
Posts: 374

Re: Absolutely Mystified

So, booting the CD and installing onto the hard drive was no problem, right ?

Can you boot using the kernel on the CD ?

Something to try : let the machine boot to the grub prompt. Then hit 'c' to get a command prompt. There you can start looking if the boot loader does the right thing. The geometry command is quite useful. ANd there is a help command.

I somehow suspect the system confuses the IDE controllers - assuming you have an onboard controller and the extra Promise card. The next time you get a failed boot, scroll back all the kernel messages and search for detection of possible IDE controllers.

Alternatively, try to disable the onboard IDE controller in the BIOS.

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#5 2003-12-08 05:40:13

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Absolutely Mystified

Hi Andy!

So, booting the CD and installing onto the hard drive was no problem, right ?

Right.

Can you boot using the kernel on the CD ?

Yes. I went into the installation to attempt repairs using the CD as a rescue disc. It booted and took me to a login prompt without any difficulty.

Something to try : let the machine boot to the grub prompt. Then hit 'c' to get a command prompt. There you can start looking if the boot loader does the right thing. The geometry command is quite useful. ANd there is a help command.

I'll take a look and get back to you.

I somehow suspect the system confuses the IDE controllers - assuming you have an onboard controller and the extra Promise card. The next time you get a failed boot, scroll back all the kernel messages and search for detection of possible IDE controllers.

You are probably right about this. But why that might be happening with our kernel and not Gentoo's is anybody's guess. I found the following thread that offers some insight as well:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … t+fs+00+00

Here, lubot has a similar problem with a Promise IDE Controller and is able to achieve an error free boot after installing the scsi kernel! Maybe simply enabling scsi support in the kernel will provide a fix as well. This is all very odd. Your thoughts?

Regards.

jlowell

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#6 2003-12-08 15:24:54

zen_guerrilla
Member
From: Greece
Registered: 2002-12-22
Posts: 259

Re: Absolutely Mystified

Hello (again smile),
trying replacing "root=/dev/discs/disc0/part3" with "root=/dev/hde3" in your grub/menu.lst (assuming that your hd is primary master on your promise ide cont.).

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#7 2003-12-08 23:22:59

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Absolutely Mystified

zen_gorilla & andy,

Someone is going to have to explain the logic of all this to me, but, as I suspected, I have been able to boot Arch successfully using the stock SCSI kernel!!!

One of the things I've always appreciated about Arch was its committment to keeping things simple and keeping free of - there's that jargon again - cruft, so when I configured my kernel originally, I didn't include SCSI support. There was no need to, the system has no SCSI devices and has only a CD reader, not a CDRW. The Promise Controller is an IDE Controller. Now I know that Windows treats IDE Controllers as SCSI devices in their "Device Manager" but this is Linux not Windows. Can someone explain to me what it is about including SCSI support that makes it possible for me to boot Arch with it but not without it? I'm not the first person here that has had both this problem and this result, lubot's had it too. Is this a bug? If so I'll report it to our team.

Another question. I enabled Advanced Power Management in the kernel yet, on this machine, it will not automatically power down, I've got to do it manually. Is there some reason for this state of affairs? It would power off automatically with the Gentoo kernel. Again, I can't fathom why the same configuration produces two different outcomes.

jlowell

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#8 2003-12-09 02:15:09

zen_guerrilla
Member
From: Greece
Registered: 2002-12-22
Posts: 259

Re: Absolutely Mystified

A quick tip :

$ pacman -S pciutils
$ lspci | grep Promise

send the output of the last command.
However, both stock kernels include support for promise ata controllers :

$ grep PDC */config
kernel-scsi/config:CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PDC202XX_OLD=y
kernel-scsi/config:CONFIG_PDC202XX_BURST=y
kernel-scsi/config:CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PDC202XX_NEW=y
kernel-scsi/config:# CONFIG_PDC202XX_FORCE is not set
kernel-scsi/config:CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PDC202XX=y
kernel-scsi/config:CONFIG_BLK_DEV_ATARAID_PDC=y
kernel/config:CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PDC202XX_OLD=y
kernel/config:CONFIG_PDC202XX_BURST=y
kernel/config:CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PDC202XX_NEW=y
kernel/config:# CONFIG_PDC202XX_FORCE is not set
kernel/config:CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PDC202XX=y
kernel/config:CONFIG_BLK_DEV_ATARAID_PDC=y

As for the shutdown problem, an option in apm kernel config about "Using real bios to shut down" or something (I don't remember exactly) must be enabled in order to handle buggy bioses. Your mobo has VIA chipset btw ?

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#9 2003-12-09 17:02:00

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Absolutely Mystified

zen_gorilla,

The plot thickens. Attempting to run

pacman -S pciutils

so as to get you the output you requested, I now learn that my network card is not being detected, this though I specifically built the card into the kernel. You should know that I reinstalled compiling my own kernel including SCSI support in the hope it would boot. It didn't, so I went into the installation via the rescue disc and tried to do the above package installation.

It seems the only way I can get this to boot is with the stock SCSI kernel;  I don't know how I'm to get my network card up at boot this way. Truthfully, I think I've either got a bad disc or there needs to be some thinking done about changes being made for our next one. To make sure I haven't got a hardware problem here, I ran an old installation disc I had for Red Hat 8.0 to make sure the hardware was being detected and that I could ping my router. Everything worked as it was intended.

I hate to say this because I really wanted Arch to be the distro for my webserver but I guess I'm going to have to shelve that idea. I've got time either to do testing for the distro or to play with something like this and, frankly, the testing is sounding more like the most sensible option. I'll try once more with a newly burned ISO. If it doesn't work, I'll have to use Gentoo as my webserver distro.

Thanks to you and andy for your attempts to be helpful.

jlowell

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#10 2003-12-09 18:22:06

Xentac
Forum Fellow
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2003-01-17
Posts: 1,797
Website

Re: Absolutely Mystified

Sounds like you're missing some option in your custom built kernel that's in the SCSI kernel and not in the IDE kernel.


I have discovered that all of mans unhappiness derives from only one source, not being able to sit quietly in a room
- Blaise Pascal

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#11 2003-12-10 01:03:05

andy
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2002-10-11
Posts: 374

Re: Absolutely Mystified

There are a number of differences in the configs - more than just SCSI. You can compare them in /var/abs/kernels of course.

Something else : did you ever try to disable the onboard IDE controller from within the BIOS ?

Also, about the NIC : try to boot with the SCSI kernel (just to get some kernel booted) and modprobe the modules for your NIC until it is detected. That way you can be certain to have the right driver compiled into the kernel - but then again - why change a running system ;-) ...

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#12 2003-12-12 06:18:42

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Absolutely Mystified

andy,

The systemboard IDE controllers are off in the BIOS except for Secondary Master to which the CD reader is connected. I've checked exhaustively to locate the critical difference between the kernels and can find nothing convincing enough that there aren't any number of other differences that are equally convincing. This step alone has required hours and hours of my time and to no effect. I'd do the modprobe for the network card, but if I can't get the kernel part of things to work without a lot of mumbo-jumbo, I'd just as soon let this whole idea go, your kind help notwithstanding.

Frankly, it goes against the grain to feel compelled to accept a stock SCSI kernel with a lot of unneeded stuff on it instead of a built-from-source IDE kernel with only what you need on it. If I were the only person with my hardware set-up to experience this problem with our install CD I'd feel a good bit more concerned about quitting on Arch for this server. But since I'm not and since I just can't afford to throw any more time at this problem, I've decided to end the misery and go with Gentoo. I only hope that our leadership takes note of this problem and deals with it effectively in Arch 0.6. At this point in the evolution of GNU/Linux problems of this kind ought to be behind us.

Again, best personal regards. Your attempts to help are appreciated.

jlowell

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#13 2003-12-12 14:39:16

zen_guerrilla
Member
From: Greece
Registered: 2002-12-22
Posts: 259

Re: Absolutely Mystified

jlowell,
I've got a suggestion...

You send me the output of :

$ lspci -v    (you need pciutils installed for that)
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
$ cat /etc/fstab

And I'll send you a nice config file along with server-centric patches (grsecurity etc.) & a slighty modified PKGBUILD so that you'd compile a nice trimmed-down kernel for your server.

Unless you want to spend the next week gentoocompiling big_smile.

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#14 2003-12-18 04:39:41

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Absolutely Mystified

zen,

Sorry having taken so long to reply to your message.

Truth be known, by the time I saw it I'd already started in on the Gentoo installation. And yes, with a PII it takes a long time, about ten hours to get through to the end of the bootstrap process and another twelve to finish, taking into account some delays for attention to unrelated personal matters.

You'll probably get a kick out of this but at first boot-up I hit a snag getting eth0 to start. Kept having to run dhcpcd to get it off the ground. Apparently, something is amiss with their current baselayout because the problem's been out there about a month now, lots and lot of users effected and no official fix, just work-arounds. Installing my workstations last Winter and Spring, there were no such troubles. Anyway, I can easily fix this problem by editing their /etc/init.d/net.eth0 and will be getting around to doing it this weekend. Maybe its God punishing me for my errand ways.  smile

All that notwithstanding, thank you for the generous offer. For the time being I think I'll stick with Gentoo and maybe try Arch again after the 0.6 CD is released.

Best regards.

jlowell

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#15 2004-01-24 22:40:58

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Absolutely Mystified

zen_gorilla, andy and Xentac,

Well, I finally figured this one out. So, for the benefit of anyone using a Promise Ultra 100 TX2 to boost the transfer rates of a hard drive connected to a DMA 33 or DMA 66 capable motherboard, make sure you have the right Promise driver selected when compiling your kernel. There's a choice to make and the right choice is "PROMISE PDC202{68|69|70|71|75||76|77} support", not the other available Promise driver. :oops:

I've just taken Gentoo off this box and installed Arch 0.5 which will now act as my webserver distro. Talk about being your own worst enemy ...

While we're at it, I'll be using this server for a no frills, show-the-flag type business site, that and nothing more. The machine has a PII on an Intel AL440LX board with 256MB SDRAM. I've got it behind a router and have assigned it a static IP with port forwarding; the rest of the network is DHCP on the same router but with an address range configured so as not to conflict with the webserver. DNS and the rest will be farmed out. I'll be running the router all the time so as to consistently maintain the IP address assigned it by my ADSL provider. I'm not anticipating very much traffic at all and I've kept package selection simply to the base Arch packages less raidtools, vim, and the "progs" type packages other than reiserfsprogs. I've added in nano, wget, cvsup, and apache. Anything here I'm missing from a packages standpoint?

Regards.

jlowell

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#16 2004-01-25 11:45:24

andy
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2002-10-11
Posts: 374

Re: Absolutely Mystified

jlowell wrote:

Well, I finally figured this one out.

I'm glad it worked out ! :-)

While we're at it, I'll be using this server for a no frills, show-the-flag type business site,
.
.
.
I've kept package selection simply to the base Arch packages less raidtools, vim,

less vim ? unacceptable ;-)

and the "progs" type packages other than reiserfsprogs. I've added in nano, wget, cvsup, and apache. Anything here I'm missing from a packages standpoint?

As long as it works, you aren't missing anything. You may recall the list I had on a webserver when you first asked about it. Also, I like to have the time right on servers, so maybe ntpd ?

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#17 2004-01-25 18:11:07

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Absolutely Mystified

Hello, andy!!

You know, I used a poor choice of words to describe some of the packages that I took out of those offered in the Arch CD's base group. I should have said "utils" packages rather than "progs" packages. My apologies. What I took out was jfsutils, raidtools, lilo, and, even though I've earned your undying disapproval for it, vim.  smile

What I added-in was nano, wget, and cvsup. Once up and running, I upgraded and added apache. I think additionally that expat went on as a dependency of apache, and there were the usual alterations with the addition of the coreutils package. One thing that's clear is that a lot has changed since the 0.5 CD made it's appearance last Summer, eh? And, yes, it comes back to me now that we'd discussed the matter of webserver packages before and you'd been kind enough to display this list:

apache-2.0.48-1          findutils-4.1.20-1       man-pages-1.63-1         procps-3.1.14-2
autoconf-2.58-1          flex-2.5.27-1            mawk-1.3.3-6             psmisc-21.3-1
automake-1.7.9-1         gcc-3.3.2-1              mktemp-1.5-1             qstat-25c-2
bash-2.05b-8             gdbm-1.8.3-1             modutils-2.4.26-1        raidtools-1.00.3-2
bin86-0.16.12-1          gettext-0.12.1-1         ncurses-5.3-1            readline-4.3-4
binutils-2.14-1          glibc-2.3.2-2            net-tools-1.60-5         reiserfsprogs-3.6.11-1
bison-1.875-1            grep-2.5-2               netkit-base-0.17-4       sed-4.0.8-1
bzip2-1.0.2-3            groff-1.19-1             netkit-bsd-finger-0.17-2 shadow-4.0.3-11
chkrootkit-0.42b-1       grub-0.93-3              nfs-utils-1.0.6-2        slocate-2.7-1
coreutils-5.0-1          gzip-1.2.4a-2            ntp-4.1.74-2             sysklogd-1.4.1-6
cpio-2.5-4               host-20031101-1          openssh-3.7.1p2-1        sysvinit-2.85-2
cvsup-16.1h-1            initscripts-0.5-8        openssl-0.9.6l-1         tar-1.13.25-1
db-4.1.25-2              kbd-1.08-1               pacman-2.7-2             tcp_wrappers-7.6-3
dcron-2.9-1              kernel-2.4.22-1          pam-0.77-4               traceroute-1.4a12-2
devfsd-1.3.25-3          less-381-1               patch-2.5.4-2            util-linux-2.12-1
dhcpcd-1.3.22pl4-2       libtool-1.5-1            pciutils-2.1.11-2        vim-6.2-1
diffutils-2.8.1-2        lilo-22.5.8-1            pcre-4.4-1               wget-1.9.1-1
e2fsprogs-1.34-1         logrotate-3.6.5-3        perl-5.8.2-4             which-2.16-1
ed-0.2-2                 m4-1.4-2                 popt-1.7-2               ypbind-mt-1.14-1
expat-1.95.7-1           mailx-8.1.1-2            portmap-5beta-9          zlib-1.1.4-2
file-4.06-1              make-3.80-1              postfix-2.0.16-1
filesystem-0.5-2         man-1.5m2-2              procinfo-18-2

I realize that some of the above are unique to your set-up but are there any that you have added since you posted initially? Also, you mentioned ntpd for what I'd have to consider excellent reasons. 

I'll say this about these minimal webserver set-ups: They certainly are minimal; mine takes up less than 400 MBs and it's quick as can be. Looks decent too, I've given the /boot/grub/menu.lst a blue and white appearance, used Dennis's patch for colorizing the boot process with blue "DONE"s and bright white "BUSY"'s to match it (yes, Dennis, I changed the color codes once it was on) and employed a red bash prompt. I mean you have to make some concession to aesthetics even with a webserver.  smile

I did the whole thing with binaries - I've been a bit rushed lately - although someday I may rebuild it either one package at a time or with red_over_blue's makelocal. I rebuilt the principal system on this network from source and continue to maintain it that way but I'm sure you'd agree that that is time consuming.

Nice to hear from you again, hope things are well with you!

jlowell

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#18 2004-01-25 19:00:37

andy
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2002-10-11
Posts: 374

Re: Absolutely Mystified

Well, I guess *I* wasn't too clear - I understood quite well what you meant.

But really, the bottom line is : if it works, why add anything ? If you want to change something/configure something and find out that something is missing : you know how easy pacman is. :-) ...

Just make sure to keep your packages up to date. This is the first rule of security.

Speaking of security : A few more points :

Installing chkrootkit might be good - and running it regularly :-) ....

Also, if you plan to compile your stuff on another machine, you can think about deinstalling gcc - however, this is one of the more dramatic security measures (usually, rootkits are installed by actually compiling them).

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#19 2004-01-25 19:55:46

jlowell
Member
Registered: 2003-08-10
Posts: 270

Re: Absolutely Mystified

andy,

But really, the bottom line is : if it works, why add anything ?

Amen. The cruft you take on without knowing it's significance can be more than just considerable also. One day you casually look at the amount of space employed and get a shock. I take out /var/cache/pacman/pkg/* as part of my regular maintenance to stay on top of this problem.

Installing chkrootkit might be good - and running it regularly  ....

I've just looked at this package's home page to see what it is, how it works, etc. Sounds good, I'll install it. One question though: You mention that the usual practice is to build chkroot from source. Other than the expected advantage of offering a more optimized end product is there some plus I'm not understanding in compiling it? We have a binary for it.

Regards.

jlowell

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#20 2004-01-25 22:15:42

andy
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2002-10-11
Posts: 374

Re: Absolutely Mystified

Sorry, no, I was too brief. chkrootkit can be used just like that using pacman -S chkrootkit.

As you probably already figured out the name stands for "check rootkit". A rootkit on the other hand, is a cracker tool (or rather a script kiddie tool). If you search long enough you can at least find old root kits on the net. They are some sort of "black box" hacking tools for script kiddies. An attacker somehow gains normal access to a server, then this attacker installs or rather uses this rootkit to gain root access (hence the name). But these rootkits are usually source only, and need to be compiled - usually on the victim's box. So, long story, short message : if there is no compiler in the first place on the server, the root kit is useless .... BUT, I have never (I think) actually removed a compiler from a system. After all, the potential attacker already has access of some sort. AND, furthermore, these kits only work if you have software with known security holes. By keeping your system up to date you also render these kits useless.

Actually, even if you don't use rootkits, an attacker usually still "prefers" to have a compiler on the victim's server.

I really don't want to scare anybody :-) ... I just have too much experience with these things ;-) - but ever since I update software I never had any problems really (I should not have said that ;-) ... I bet there is a law that NOW I will have some problems ;-) )

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