Arch Linux

looptard

Member

Registered: 2019-03-21

Posts: 2

[SOLVED]ZFS chroot/ fixing error after improper readline update

I am absolutely unfamiliar with Archlinux. So I apologise in advance for any noob mistakes.

Background:
I have a system with archlinux(4.9.37-1-lts) that was maintained by someone else who is not working here anymore. This system is still being used by a few of us who run codes.

The issue:
I needed to install a package for one of the codes that I had to run and I encountered the libreadline.so.* error, and I naively thought updating the readline package would solve the issue and did so. After much time on the forums I now seem to realise the magnitude of the error that I had just committed. We can't ssh into the system now because of the readline error. I can't directly login either because once i put the login credentials, I am sent back to the login screen.

Forum posts I read either suggested running pacman -Syu from a livedisk or mkinitcpio -P after chroot to fix the issue.

However, the pre-requisite was to chroot into this device.

When I run cfdisk, I see three partitions
/dev/sda1 -> EFI
/dev/sda2 -> linux filesystem
/dev/sda3 -> solaris root.

The sda2 is swap and sda3 is "zfs_member".

I am not able to run
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt
which gives me an "unknown filesystem of type zfs_member" error.

I tried to follow instructions on installing archzfs on the archiso to see if I can mount it, but when I include archzfs in the pacman.conf file and run pacman -Syyu, it works fine and then I keep getting a string of "write failed" errors. Is this an issue because I am running out of space in my pendrive(it is an 8 gig pendrive) which has the archiso ?

Can someone help me out?

Cheers.

Last edited by looptard (2019-03-22 20:12:15)

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: [SOLVED]ZFS chroot/ fixing error after improper readline update

To allow more storage space in the live environment use the cow_spacesize= boot parameter.

But you may have difficulties upgrading such an old system so perhaps use the ALA to do it in stages (and check the news for any interventions that may be required).

---

Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

looptard

Member

Registered: 2019-03-21

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED]ZFS chroot/ fixing error after improper readline update

Thanks. I was able to finally fix the issue.

While the cow_spacesize= did fix the issue of write failures, I simply could not get archzfs to work on the latest archiso. I had almost given up when I decided to use a ubuntu live cd to try and chroot. However chroot was also not possible with the libreadline issue. However, i was easily able to mount the zfs partition on the ubuntu live cd (after installing zfs utils and modprobe zfs ; zpool import -a -R /mnt )to access the data. When I was trying to save the userdata, I was luckily able to find the iso that the old admin had built with zfs enabled in his home folder.

Then it was just a simple matter of burning that iso onto another stick, and booting into to the archiso.

Then

modprobe zfs;
zpool import -a -R /mnt
pacman -r /mnt - U /mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg/*older readline.7.0 tar file* (for any noobs like me out there, you can find by using ls|grep readline after changing to the pkg directory )

reboot and problem solved.

I guess this might have been solved days ago if I could get archzfs to work.

Now I will try to update the system slowly to a more current version.

Cheers.