Well, this is weird.

We've all seen "Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D to
continue):", usually after an unclean shutdown.

I'm getting it on shutdown itself. I've never even heard of this, and
searching google I haven't found any reference to it.

This is a home theatre PC running MythTV.  Frontend only, so there are
no fancy drivers in the system, just video (nvidia 8756 driver), sound
(snd_hda_intel), and lirc with streamzap.  System was build from scratch
for this purpose, recently, so it is pretty up to date.  P4 with
hyperthreading. Normally runs with no keyboard or mouse or VGA, only an
SVIDEO-out from an NVidia card. BIOS has obviously been set to ignore
boot errors.

Myth running or not running is irrelevant, I've seen the shutdown
problem in both situations.

I've also seen the problem whether shutting down with a quick press to
the power button, or using ssh to run a shutdown command.

Here's a sequence:
  - press power button
  - this is presumably caught by acpid, which turns it into an "init 0"
command
  - hdd lights blink, eventually X is stopped
  - when X stops, that initial login prompt that came out before X
started is now displayed again, and right there I get the "Give root
password ..." prompt.

Sometimes the svideo-out console hasn't been restored so I can't see any
of this, it is only on a connected monitor (if there is a connected
monitor). Usually the svideo-out console is restored on X shutdown, so
this does in fact display.

After this happened a few times and didn't seem to be going away on its
own :) I grumbled, dug up a keyboard and plugged it in, entered the root
password.

The log shows ntpd, sshd and syslog-ng shutdowns. There are no messages
following the syslog-ng shutdown. :)

ifconfig returns nothing.

runlevel says "3 0"

rc-status exhibits poor grammar "* Could not local current runlevel in
/var/lib/init.d/softlevel * Assuming current runlevel is 'single'"
Sure enough, there is no softlevel file at this point in a partway
shutdown system.

df shows local partitions (/, /var, /usr) still mounted, and the sole
NFS mount has been taken down. local partitions are all ext2, no lvm or
anything fancy.

kernel is 2.6.16-gentoo-r3
System is vanilla, except for ~x86 keywords on nvidia-kernel and
nvidia-driver to get the recent 8756 versions.

Any suggestions on how to further debug? Or suggestions as to what may
be going on?

Thanks,

glen


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