Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: glen martin <lists@××××××××.org>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Shutdown pauses partway with "Give root password"
Date: Tue, 09 May 2006 14:59:22
Message-Id: 4460A549.8010101@locutory.org
1 Resending ... anyone have a clue as to why the "Give root password for
2 maintenance ..." prompt would come up occasionally at shutdown time?
3
4 >>>
5
6 Well, this is weird.
7
8 We've all seen "Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D to
9 continue):", usually after an unclean shutdown.
10
11 I'm getting it on shutdown itself. I've never even heard of this, and
12 searching google I haven't found any reference to it.
13
14 It isn't happening every time - it'll go 2 or 3 or 6 (but certainly not
15 4 or 5 :b) times with clean predictable shutdowns. I can't tell that
16 anything is different in the times I shutdown fails - there aren't any
17 symptoms of any misbehaviour until the message itself.
18
19 This is a home theatre PC running MythTV. Frontend only, so there are
20 no fancy drivers in the system, just video (nvidia 8756 driver), sound
21 (snd_hda_intel), and lirc with streamzap. System was build from scratch
22 for this purpose, recently, so it is pretty up to date. P4 with
23 hyperthreading. Normally runs with no keyboard or mouse or VGA, only an
24 SVIDEO-out from an NVidia card. BIOS has obviously been set to ignore
25 post errors given the lack of keyboard.
26
27 Myth running or not running is irrelevant, I've seen the shutdown
28 problem in both situations.
29
30 I've also seen the problem whether shutting down with a quick press to
31 the power button, or using ssh to run a shutdown command.
32
33 Here's a sequence:
34 - press power button
35 - this is presumably caught by acpid, which turns it into an "init 0"
36 command
37 - hdd lights blink, eventually X is stopped
38 - when X stops, that initial login prompt that came out before X
39 started is now displayed again, and right there I get the "Give root
40 password ..." prompt.
41
42 Sometimes the svideo-out console hasn't been restored so I can't see any
43 of this, it is only on a connected monitor (if there is a connected
44 monitor). Usually the svideo-out console is restored on X shutdown, so
45 this does in fact display.
46
47 After this happened a few times and didn't seem to be going away on its
48 own :) I grumbled, dug up a keyboard and plugged it in, entered the root
49 password.
50
51 The log shows ntpd, sshd and syslog-ng shutdowns. There are no messages
52 following the syslog-ng shutdown. :)
53
54 ifconfig returns nothing.
55
56 runlevel says "3 0"
57
58 rc-status exhibits poor grammar "* Could not local current runlevel in
59 /var/lib/init.d/softlevel * Assuming current runlevel is 'single'"
60 Sure enough, there is no softlevel file at this point in a partway
61 shutdown system.
62
63 df shows local partitions (/, /var, /usr) still mounted, and the sole
64 NFS mount has been taken down. local partitions are all ext2, no lvm or
65 anything fancy.
66
67 kernel is 2.6.16-gentoo-r3
68 System is vanilla, except for ~x86 keywords on nvidia-kernel and
69 nvidia-driver to get the recent 8756 versions.
70
71 Any suggestions on how to further debug? Or suggestions as to what may
72 be going on?
73
74 Thanks,
75
76 glen
77
78
79
80 --
81 gentoo-user@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Shutdown pauses partway with "Give root password" Hans-Werner Hilse <hilse@×××.de>