For years I've had a trick where I moved one of the mingetty lines in /etc/inittab up to the top (below the first line usually) to get a terminal on another virtual console during boot. This is very useful when an init script is hanging for some reason. You can log in and take a look.
Today on my Fedora 11 workstation, after an update and booting into a new kernel, the MessageBus service started to hang on start, making my system unbootable. After mucking about in single user mode, I figured out how to get a virtual console with upstart during boot. I just edited /etc/event.d/tty3 (you could use any tty) and added a line near the top: start on startup Now from the moment the kernel runs init, I have a login prompt on vt 3. Using this I was able to determine that MessageBus was failing because the network wasn't yet running (which is normally started by NetworkManager in conjunction with events from MessageBus later!), which was in turn because of a chicken and egg issue with LDAP that suddenly manifested itself with this batch of updates. The solution to that was to add a line "bind_policy soft" to /etc/ldap.conf[1]. Note that if you're using the rhgb system I don't know if this will even work or if it will screw up the graphical boot. I never use graphical boot screens. Anyway, I thought that others may find this a useful trick, so I post it here. Michael [1] Fedora and Red Hat (or maybe all of Linux) have a long history of ldap chicken and egg issues that often get fixed, then reappear later, sadly. RHEL 4 had a bad regression about a year ago that prevented the LDAP daemon from starting if the LDAP daemon wasn't running... Why authconfig doesn't add the bind_policy line to ldap.conf by default I don't know! /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
