Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: glen martin <lists@××××××××.org>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Shutdown halts partway with "Give root password"
Date: Sun, 07 May 2006 22:59:21
Message-Id: 445E7802.8030209@locutory.org
1 Well, this is weird.
2
3 We've all seen "Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D to
4 continue):", usually after an unclean shutdown.
5
6 I'm getting it on shutdown itself. I've never even heard of this, and
7 searching google I haven't found any reference to it.
8
9 This is a home theatre PC running MythTV. Frontend only, so there are
10 no fancy drivers in the system, just video (nvidia 8756 driver), sound
11 (snd_hda_intel), and lirc with streamzap. System was build from scratch
12 for this purpose, recently, so it is pretty up to date. P4 with
13 hyperthreading. Normally runs with no keyboard or mouse or VGA, only an
14 SVIDEO-out from an NVidia card. BIOS has obviously been set to ignore
15 boot errors.
16
17 Myth running or not running is irrelevant, I've seen the shutdown
18 problem in both situations.
19
20 I've also seen the problem whether shutting down with a quick press to
21 the power button, or using ssh to run a shutdown command.
22
23 Here's a sequence:
24 - press power button
25 - this is presumably caught by acpid, which turns it into an "init 0"
26 command
27 - hdd lights blink, eventually X is stopped
28 - when X stops, that initial login prompt that came out before X
29 started is now displayed again, and right there I get the "Give root
30 password ..." prompt.
31
32 Sometimes the svideo-out console hasn't been restored so I can't see any
33 of this, it is only on a connected monitor (if there is a connected
34 monitor). Usually the svideo-out console is restored on X shutdown, so
35 this does in fact display.
36
37 After this happened a few times and didn't seem to be going away on its
38 own :) I grumbled, dug up a keyboard and plugged it in, entered the root
39 password.
40
41 The log shows ntpd, sshd and syslog-ng shutdowns. There are no messages
42 following the syslog-ng shutdown. :)
43
44 ifconfig returns nothing.
45
46 runlevel says "3 0"
47
48 rc-status exhibits poor grammar "* Could not local current runlevel in
49 /var/lib/init.d/softlevel * Assuming current runlevel is 'single'"
50 Sure enough, there is no softlevel file at this point in a partway
51 shutdown system.
52
53 df shows local partitions (/, /var, /usr) still mounted, and the sole
54 NFS mount has been taken down. local partitions are all ext2, no lvm or
55 anything fancy.
56
57 kernel is 2.6.16-gentoo-r3
58 System is vanilla, except for ~x86 keywords on nvidia-kernel and
59 nvidia-driver to get the recent 8756 versions.
60
61 Any suggestions on how to further debug? Or suggestions as to what may
62 be going on?
63
64 Thanks,
65
66 glen
67
68
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