Re: [gentoo-user] Strange boot problem - any ideas?

Helmut Jarausch <jarausch@××××××××××××××××.de> [10-12-15 10:00]:
> Hi,
>
> I have to power down one of my machines each day.
> Booting it the other day fails from time to time.
> On this (and all my machines)  /usr is on an ext4 file system by its
> own. It looks as if mounting /usr fails sometimes (silently).
> The first unusual message is that it cannot find the file
> /usr/sbin/acpid . After that, most other actions fail as well.
>
> Once the machine has failed to boot it will fail every time afterwards
> unless I do the following:
> I boot by a rescue CD, change root and re-emerge sys-power/acpid (this
> package contains /usr/sbin/acpid).
> This single action has helped without any problem each time I had to
> try it.
>
> Of course, I've done many checks on the drive hosting the /usr
> partition - no errors at all (the drive is only a few months old and a
> good one (enterprise edition)).
>
> So, I suspect openrc. Might it be that this is a timing problem and
> openrc doesn't check if the partition is mounted? Booting has worked
> just flawlessly on that machine for more than a year. It looks as if a
> recent version of openrc (currently 0.6.8) has generated this problem.
>
> Thanks for any hint,
> Helmut.
>
>

Hi Helmut,

it would be interesting to know, whether /usr/sbin/acpid is really
missing, when the boot fails. 

If it is not missing, the boot fails due to a mount problem and not 
the re-installing of acpid as such cures the problem, but what this
installation is doing else.
Or in other words: Any installation, which put someting into /usr
cures the problem.

If the mount of /usr is the problem, which arises from a timing
problem than there is something done in parallel which should be done
in sequence (and was previously done in sequence).

I dont know openrc, but may be a setting in its configuration file
regarding this aspect will cure the problem?

Good luck!

Best regards,
mcc