Hi people. I have here a real conundrum for you:

I'm operating an IBM server (an X306, I think ? not sure). Anyway it has
a weird setup which is mostly my fault - I wanted to run Fedora on it
but the driver for the Adaptec controler it uses only works with the
RHEL/CentOS 5 kernel, so I installed CentOS 5 and then upgraded
everything but the kernel to Fedora 7. But never mind that - Yesterday I
upgraded to Fedora 8 and after that the server went caput - I can't log
in through SSH or through the console and almost no service manages to
start.

Looking closely, it appears that it doesn't recognize any user - not
regular users and not system users, and as such most services break.
Surprisingly, I can get the system recognize users by simply accessing
the /etc/passwd file. It looks something like this:

# getent passwd root
<no output here>
# ls -l /etc/passwd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root ... /etc/passwd
# getent passwd root
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash

I could get the server to boot normally and let me log in by
editing /etc/rc.sysinit and after the script mounts the file systems I
added 
touch /etc/passwd /etc/group /etc/shadow
And now I can log in, but a lot of stuff still doesn't work - for
example xinetd doesn't load any services until I do
ls /etc/protocols, and chkconfig fails with funny error messages about
not being able to list /etc/rc?.d/[SK][0-9][0-9]something. Basically
software can't access files until I get a shell to look at them -
totally haizenberg style.

What's going on ? I think I can work around the problems by doing
something like
find /etc > /dev/null
but this whole problem is really silly, am I living in a different
reality ?

I'd appreciate it if someone can pinch me so I'll wake up from this
weird dream.


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