David A. Bandel ha scritto: >> I've seen far more machine blocked at boot because someone did an error >> with lilo (like the most common of forgetting to run it) then machine >> destroyed by a dd. > > Probably because the admin didn't know LILO even existed. Sounds like a > reason to keep it in to me. Just run lilo when you upgrade the kernel. > If it's not installed, no harm done. If it's in use, then you just > saved yourself a headache. Seems like a no-brainer to me. >
In my experience, at least in a case, the machine was dead because the admin, not a particular bright one, run LILO. He removed the old kernel from the lilo.conf and put in it a not working one... You cannot use LILO to solve this, you have first to boot with something else, then use lilo. In any case having nothing to run after a kernel upgrade is more no-brainer than remembering to run lilo. > I've never lost an OS or lots of important data just because the system > didn't boot, only lost 2-5 minutes uptime (Dells take forever to boot). > Me too, but I'm always using GRUB. So what's the point? > LILO recovery? Simple: > 1. If you have other kernels, you can probably still boot from them. > Just do so and run lilo and reboot. Just the same with GRUB, so where is the advantage? > 2. No other bootable kernel? Boot from another source (network, CD w/ > Knoppix), mount the partition, run lilo, reboot. No, if you don't have a bootable kernel in your blocked system this procedure will just make the boot fail another time. That if the problem is effectively the absence of a bootable kernel. If you want to recover from this scenario, then you have first to install a bootable kernel in your system (doable, but not such an easy thing to do when you are booting in different system), then configure LILO to use it, install LILO and then reboot. For GRUB you can do the same, but you have also an alternative: if you have a GRUB floppy with GRUB and working kernel for that machine you can directly boot the blocked system. That's doable, but not worth the effort in my opinion, it's far easier to use a rescue floppy for your machine to do just the same. If your scenario instead is the one (as it seems from your solution) that someone misconfigured LILO and installed it without putting in its configuration any bootable kernel, (like in my previous example) than your procedure is right. But it's far more simple to resolve this problem using GRUB, were you have just to select from its shell the still present but unreacheable (for LILO) kernel, and then boot it. And if that one is the right kernel to launch, you don't have to reboot anything and save the boring wait of the long Dell boot time... This is probably one of the reason for GRUB success. At least is the main reason because I prefer it to LILO. > On login, you can change shells easily (I do on occasion). You can't > change boot loaders on bootup. > You can't also change a shell whitout the one you are using. You have to use a shell to setup a new one to use later. So what's your point? If you want to change bootloader first boot with the one you have, (LILO or GRUB), install the one you want (GRUB or LILO) and then you can reboot with it. I did this at least a ten times when I upgraded my servers to Debian Sarge. Why anyone should want to change a bootloader on bootup when this can be done easily after the boot? So let me repeat, what's your point? However some time ago with GRUB I was capable also to change the boot loader almost on bootup, booting a blocked system with a GRUB floppy, and then changing the bootloader. It was the same case I already told: the system was blocked because an incompetent sysadmin installed a new (broken) kernel and removed the old one (but just from lilo.conf). And unfortunately he did not forgot to run lilo... There was no rescue disk and I used my GRUB floppy (i.e. a floppy containing just GRUB, that I did for the sake to start blocked system without having to boot an alternative one) just to boot the old working kernel. Then to avoid futher problems I installed GRUB on the machine. I did not istalled GRUB directly from the GRUB floppy, but if I had the GRUB binaries preinstalled in the disk, it I could have done also that (because GRUB can also install itself form its shell). Regards Simone _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [email protected] http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
