I have two questions. One is my situation, and one is a generalized question relating to it. First, I am in a bad situation here. I have been using all the new beta versions of packages updated off of cooker for some time now. I was always amazed by the fact that even though these were all barely tested packages, they actually worked quite well on my system together. I'm not running a server or anything, so I was just grabbing these new packages for fun to test them out. I was amazed at how well Mandrake was working, and I never had one problem (I had plenty of little bugs using stable RedHat). But one day, when setting up a boot-net server, I guess all my months of stability caught up with me and I ran into quite a problem.
I was working on making my system into a net-boot device for my old sun. So I tried to recall how to do this, referred to some docs, and got to work. I installed bootparamd, rarpd, tftpd, and nfs. It took me a few hours, but I got all the boot stuff working all the way to the point that I could watch the debian splash screen and a few kernel messages on my sun. Now it was time for the NFS. I created an exports file and started up nfs. However, the service locked, and I had to break it. I figured out something was wrong (I no longer remember what), fixed it, and tried it again. Now I got nfs debug errors and big FAILED messages for the service. But I felt one step closer. I tried again, and it hardlocked the system with a kernel oops. I rebooted and tried again. I uninstalled nfs, reinstalled, and tried one more time. Still another hardlock. So I booted again, and got a message to the effect of "invalid superblock, please use 'root='". So this kind of sucked. I tried booting off an old mdk 8.2 cd I had lying around, but it couldn't auto-load my software raid-0 array in order to fsck it. So I have two questions: 1. Can I easily fix my problem by booting a resue CD/disk, creating a propper /etc/raidtab, then running mkraid and fsck? 2. How does the system know what my raid array is. For instance, the kernel can boot my raid array without reading /etc/raidtab, because /etc is on the array. Certain modern distro CD's can figure out where my / partition is, load up the raid array, and read it no problem, without needing /etc. But I suppose they can't do this without a valid superblock. Can someone explain this process to me? Also, ext3 creates redundant superblocks throughout the partition, right? -Eric Hattemer -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://fastmail.fm - Same, same, but different...
