Ok, for the record, I am part Irish, and hence I don't think I've ever
had a problem with one of MY systems booting. But I do get called over
whenever someone else has a problem, which is why I'm asking this.
I'm looking for a fairly simple how-to/faq/tutorial document for how to
go in and control the bootup of most linuxes (well, something that would
cover RedHat/Slackware/Mandrake installs at least), and let me do some
diagnostic stuff to figure out what's going wrong, and let me bypass and
continue booting. Something that would explain (not extensively) what
all that stuff it's doing is actually, uh, doing.
For instance, the hardware engineer guy this morning comes to me and
says that one of his instrumentation computers isn't coming up, can I
fix it. So I go look at it, it's stuck trying to mount NFS stuff. Most
likely something is down on our oh so flakey network, and it's stalling
on that. But I'd like to look all sharp and wizardly by typing in some
truly esoteric commands to let me figure out exactly what isn't working,
and maybe bypass that stage if it's beyong my control.
So where can I learn to do this?
Dammit Jim, I'm a software engineer, not a sys admin!
-Charles
