Re: Incident of post-boot diagnostic barfing

On Sat, 19 Apr 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup linux.redhat, in article
<a57df825-0b7f-4e96-bfc0-b1514aeb95fa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Charles Packer wrote:

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Moe Trin wrote:

Really impossible to tell. For starters, _which_ key did you hit?
When you did that, did it present a "new" login prompt, or what? I

I don't recall -- too flustered. I should emphasize that
the output in question started after the boot had completed.
I had glanced at the screen and seen that it was ready
to log in.

That is, it had cleared the screen, and was presenting a 'login:'
prompt.

Then a few seconds later, I came back and it was scrolling away. The
text wasn't, you know, English messages.

That's the trouble - we _don't_ know, because your description provides
no clue. There shouldn't be anything BY DEFAULT sending output to the
display when it's at the login prompt. What's worse, pressing "a" key
(really hard to tell what that means, but assuming you pressed a single
key, probably from the letter portion of the keyboard) should not have
any effect if some application or daemon was sending text to the
/dev/tty0 display. It's not as if the application/daemon would see the
output and realize "oops, I shouldn't be doing this". Pressing the
left Alt _and_ F2 (or F3..F6) keys would take you to a different
virtual console, but I think you'd know that you did this.

It looked like some kind of device status information which, again, I
was too startled to try to parse.

Only thing I can think of would be 'anacron' starting something that
would normally go to a xterm, and because you haven't logged in, the
error is going to the console - but why pressing "a" key would stop
this is beyond me. I don't use anacron (my systems stay up 24/7 and
so use vixie-cron)

[compton ~]$ whatis anacron cron
anacron (8) - runs commands periodically
cron (8) - daemon to execute scheduled commands (Vixie Cron)
[compton ~]$

but you may want to check if there is a file '/etc/anacrontab' and if
it specifies some task to run shortly after boot (second field is the
delay in minutes). It _may_ be that the job completed just as you
pressed the key. That's a stretch, but is about all I can think of.

It could also have been the regular Vixie-cron running (or trying to
run) a task, but as Vixie-cron runs jobs at specific times of the day
(look at /etc/crontab, and /var/spool/cron/* to see if there is any
such jobs), the chance of you hitting that time is about as good as
hitting the Lotto.

I have come in to the computer room, and discovered all of the
systems sitting at the boot prompt - nearly always the result of a
power outage that lasted long enough for the UPS to signal "I've had
it - you better shut down" to all of the systems. When power returns,
and the UPS have enough put back into the battery, the systems restart
on their own. But this could have occurred hours before I wander in
to discover this. I have never seen any extraneous text on the display
(and I run all of my systems on runlevel 3 - text login - like you).

At that point, uppermost in my mind was the integrity of my hard
drive. I've since backed up to cd-rom some crucial research data and
can rest easy now.

Backups are very important, but it's better knowing what was going on
so that you won't be surprised in the future. You also want to be
sure that the system is up to date, and not open to attack from the
Big Bad World(tm).

Old guy
.