On 7/7/06, Scott R. Godin <scott.g@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
this is *exactly* the sort of thing I saw the last time my system went
screwy.
The first thing you have to worry about is filesystem corruption. boot
from the install cd, and enter the linux rescue mode, and do not mount
the drives when prompted.
fsck each of your partitions manually, possibly more than once if you
encounter a drive with many problems.
Good idea! I'll do this.
Once you are able to get through that cleanly, then reboot the system
normally
identifying the corrupted packages is your next step, again with
rpm -Va > rpmverify.txt 2>&1
then step through the packages in question *carefully*
things like glibc you don't want to first remove and then install :-)
use ( yumdownloader <packagename> ) to grab the current package one at a
time, and use ( rpm -ivh --force packagename*rpm ) to re-install it in
place.
I did rpm -U --force xyz.rpm from the install dvd (thinking that I'd
better be offline with a possibly hacked /usr/bin/passwd), until the
rpm -Va list shrinked to an acceptable size (which doesn't mean a
thing of course). Curiously, it took a few rounds: new items were
cropping up for a while.
it may be a wise idea, once you have finished this process, to use
tune2fs to set up automatic filesystem checks at boot time periodically.
(I myself set up a 25 remount or 3 weeks option set on mine though
that's a tad on the paranoid side.. however faced with the above, you
might think the same way as me -- catch it early. )
I used
tune2fs -c 25 -i 3w /dev/sda3
to make these settings on my / partition. tune2fs -l will list the
current settings for you. the manpage for tune2fs is particularly
enlightening in its description of the -c switch, and I recommend
reading it.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll read up on tune2fs!
to catch further filesystem stuff like this, sooner, you might consider
running rpm -Va once a week in a cron job.
Actually, I noticed all this by diffing the output of rpm -Va with the
one I got two days ago.
Andras
