user failures

[John Summerfield]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Saturday 05 January 2008, John Summerfield wrote:
>> Gene Heskett wrote:
>>> Greetings;
>>>
>>> I had my boot drives partition table zeroed out last night by something
>>> unk, and then X froze.
>> Coincidentally, I've just had a kubuntu system destroy itself. It was
>> installed as 7.04, upgraded to 7.10.
>>
>> Much to my astonishment, the system (cheap ASUS mobo, socket-A CPU, via
>> chipset, generic) can suspend and hibernate, and power up on keypress.
>>
>> As best I can figure it, this is the sequence of events.
>>
>> I powered down, presumably using the new-found hibernate ability.
>>
>> I booted, chose a XEN-capable kernel. It might have been a 7.04 kernel,
>> I couldn't see one obviously for 7.10.
>>
>> I shut down.
>>
>> I booted, chose the latest (non-XEN) kernel.
>>
>> It resumed!
>>
>> I used it for a time.
>>
>> I shut down.
>>
>> I rebooted.
>>
>> Now, we have a complicating factor: I use VGA=791, but with this kernel
>> framebuffer does not work so I'm booting blind: nothing to see until X
>> starts.
>>
>> Anyway, Nothing visible happened for a long time.
>>
>> I reset, then booted with VGA=6.
>>
>> System booted for manual fsck.
>>
>> I thought unkind thoughts about people who write fsck programs whose
>> reports and messages are entirely incomprehensible to all but the
>> highest of high priests, and ran
>> e2fsck -y /dev/hda6
>>
>> There were lots and lots of messages about blocks being zeroed and/or
>> freed and e2fsck restarting.
>>
>> Eventually, it finshed and ^D lead to a reboot.
>>
>> Later, I ran cfdisk to see what the partition table is, for reasons
>> nothing to do with the above problems.
>>
>> cfdisk declined to do anything, but fdisk is happy to have a look.
>>
>> The partition table includes logs of hooley, with overlapping partitions
>> and general mess.
>>
>> "reinstall" comes to mind. Fortunately, hda7 seems okay. I've copied it
>> to another drive.
>>
>> I've looked around, everything seems to work, _but_ I don't see how or
>> why I should trust it.
>>
>> Fortunately, "reinstall" was close to the top of the agenda for this
>> box, and the main question was "with what?"
>>
>> Disk drive checks ok with smartctl and there are no errors logged to
>> syslog.. Drive had about 345 power-on hours, shouldn't have expired yet.
>>
>>
>> Choices are SL5, C5 and (possibly) Debian.
>>
>> Makes me wonder whether there might have been something unusual going on
>> in your system,
>>
>>
> I have f8 (latest i386 respin dvd) installed on it now, and have about got 
> everything configured, but its been an interesting ride so far.
> 
> One instant problem is bothering me, it appears that my kmail filters menu 
> survived the recovery from an amrecover session, but it is now immutable, so 
> I can't add some of the new aliases to a filter rule.  I can add them to the 
> filter screen, but when I click the apply button, anything I've added is 
> reverted to the original.  
> 
> Now, the weirdsville part is that I can open 
> the /root/.kde/share/config/kmailrc with less or vim, and the rules I've 
> added ARE there.
> 
> That files perms are:
> -rw------- 1 root root 99100 2008-01-05 22:31 /root/.kde/share/config/kmailrc
> 
> Can someone else please do an ls -l on their file and show me what it has for 
> perms on your f8 machine that can successfully edit those filter rules.
[summer at potoroo ~]$ lsattr /home/summer/.kde/share/config/kmailrc;\ls 
-Zl /home/summer/.kde/share/config/kmailrc
-------------- /home/summer/.kde/share/config/kmailrc
-rw------- 1 system_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0 summer summer 16669 Dec 29 
20:15 /home/summer/.kde/share/config/kmailrc
[summer at potoroo ~]$

> 
> I've nuked /root/kmailrc, and then restarted kmail as root, with no visible 
> effect.  The edits are lost the instant I click 'apply'
> 
> Am I barking up the wrong tree here or what?
> 
> Thanks John and to anybody else that wants to chime in with helpfull info 
> here, I'm plumb bumfuzzled from lack of sleep (a graveyard session at the 
> transmitter last night also turned into a nightmare) and this whole damned 
> zeroed out partition table fiasco.
> 
> And as I add stuff back, selinux is being a PITA, so I may yet  
> touch /.autorelabel and reboot, but there are no messages about that above 
> file.  Nor are there any messages about it in setroubleshoot's display.
> 
There is a command you can run.... Take a look at restorecon


-- 

Cheers
John

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