On Thu, 9 Oct 1997, Alastair Gregory wrote: > I have an odd problem with my Debian system. When > it boots up into multi-user mode, it "automatically" logs in > as 'root' on the first console. It's impossible to terminate > the session, as a new one starts immediately after I exit > the shell. It's in run level 2 and the other consoles behave > normally.
Look at the line beginning 1: in /etc/inittab. > Another problem I have is that the machine won't reboot > by itself. If I "telinit 6", it shuts down, then sits there > without rebooting until I hit the reset button. Is this an > AMD quirk? I had a Cyrix machine that would sometimes do this (and on power-on, it would just sit there without POSTing). > I loaded Debian 1.3 on an old AMD 486-80 based > machine. It seemed to load properly, except that a > number of utilities were not present (such as 'dselect', > "mesg", "start-stop-daemon"). I was a bit dubious, but > not having loaded Debian for a while (last time it was > at 1.0, I think) I just assumed I wasn't up with the > latest developments. I scrounged a dselect binary which > ran, but no access methods were available so I was > no better off. > > The autologin phenomenon didn't manifest itself until I > tried reinstalling the base system from the boot diskettes. > On booting from the hard disk after this, it asked me to > pick a root password, but after the "passwd" dialog, > it'd say "Try again" and run "passwd" again. I flipped to > another console, logged in as a mere user, su'ed and killed > the passwd and bash processes, and ran "passwd" manually > to set the root password. Now I have the autologin problem > but "dselect" seems to be OK. > > My guess is that part(s) of the Debian load process didn't > complete, or failed silently. Can anyone shed light on this? > Could I somehow have bad install disks and not know it? Deian shuffles inittab.real (if I remember the filename correctly) and inittab when it completes correctly. It was months ago, and I had had to reboot while in that first session after setting the root password, so the shuffling didn't get done. Once I fixed my problem (I think it was when perl had problems, maybe a bad link) and edited inittab, the system was fine. -- David Wright, Open University, Earth Science Department, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA U.K. email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel: +44 1908 653 739 fax: +44 1908 655 151 -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
