>>> On 12/11/2008 at 10:36 PM, Sue Sivets <[email protected]> wrote: 
> I booted one of our sles 8 systems manually this afternoon for the first
> time in a long time.

You might want to consider shooting that poor thing to put it out of its misery.

> This system is usually booted by VM during an ipl.
> During the boot process the system displayed the following messages:
>     INIT: /etc/inittab: missing id field
>     INIT: /etc/inittab: id field too long (max 4 characters)
> 
>     INIT: cannot execute "/usr/sbin/getty"
>     INIT: Id "cons" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
> 
>     SCSI subsystem driver Revision:
> 1.00
>     Dec 11 21:30:54 suse80 kernel: SCSI subsystem driver Revision:
> 1.00
>     Dec 11 21:30:54 suse80 modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module
> block-major-65
> 
> Can anyone shed some light on any of these for me please?
> 
> Is there any documentation on what the format is for the inittab file,
> or what the contents should look like?

man inittab talks about that.  See below for what ships with SLES8 SP4 (with 
all the comments and blank lines removed).

> I found a couple of lines that I
> think are from one of my users trying to install something, and these
> lines are followed by what looks like a comment, only the comment line
> does not have a # sign at the beginning

Users updating /etc/inittab?  Never a good idea.

> The "cannot execute /usr/sbin/getty" message is comming out over and
> over endlessly. I checked, and there is no file called getty in
> /usr/sbin, and this command appears more than once in /etc/inittab.

It's been a couple of years since I installed one, but that kind of sounds like 
a RHEL inittab got written out by something.  Just what application were they 
trying to install?

For a newer SLES system, that should be /sbin/mingetty:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --noclear /dev/ttyS0 dumb
The entry from SLES8 SP4 specifically was:
1:012356:respawn:/sbin/mingetty /dev/ttyS0

> I'm getting a whole slew of  "modprobe: Can't locate module
> block-major-xx" type message, but all the disk that are defined in the
> VM directory and in zipl.conf are available and error free, so why  the
> modprobe messages?

block-major-## does not only mean DASD devices.  Look in 
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt for what each of them are.  In the 
case of block-major-65, that would be a SCSI disk drive.  Depending on the 
minor number, it would be /dev/sdq through /dev/sdaf.  The module that would 
provide support for those would be sd_mod.o.  If you're never going to be using 
any SCSI disks on that system, you can update /etc/modules.conf with:
alias block-major-65  off
or
alias block-major-65  sd_mod
which will cause the kernel to automatically load the module for you.


Mark Post

id:3:initdefault:
si::bootwait:/etc/init.d/boot
l0:0:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 0
l1:1:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 1
l2:2:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 2
l3:3:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 3
l5:5:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 5
l6:6:wait:/etc/init.d/rc 6
ls:S:wait:/etc/init.d/rc S
ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -r -t 4 now
~~:S:respawn:/sbin/sulogin /dev/ttyS0
pf::powerwait:/etc/init.d/powerfail start
pn::powerfailnow:/etc/init.d/powerfail now
po::powerokwait:/etc/init.d/powerfail stop
sh:12345:powerfail:/sbin/shutdown -h now THE POWER IS FAILING
1:012356:respawn:/sbin/mingetty /dev/ttyS0

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