On Wed, 16 May 2007, William L. Maltby wrote:
Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 17:56:29 -0400 From: William L. Maltby CentOS4Bill@triad.rr.com Reply-To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org To: CentOS General List centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] Re: Now I can't shutdown [was: Screen blanks afteral setup (Centos 5)]
On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 21:10 +0300, Itay wrote:
** I failed to mention earlier that the media check prior to installation *failed*. I decided to go on with the installation because my own experience so far, and others', showed that failure does not necessarily imply bad media. But see below.
Based on investigation I've done in response to the thread here,
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2007-April/079718.html
and the advice by several in that thread, you need to have padding on the media. I'm authoring a "SOLVED" message for that thread, but haven't completed my tests.
[snip]
Use one of the padding methods mentioned in that thread and you should be OK and the errors should disappear.
*panic*
Bill, thank you for the detailed reply.
I tried the padding technique - the media errors were gone; kernel panic - stayed. I hope that you or others may help me with this.
Here is what I did:
1 Burnt i386 DVD using the padding method offered by Johnny Hughes http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2007-April/079828.html (Check sum OK.)
2 Booted to install + Media check OK + Finished installation w/o noticable problems - This time there were no error messages about i/o problems, bad sectors, etc. - anaconda.log had some warning messages regarding to some missing /etc, /usr, and few libs. (Similar to 1st installation.) + Rebooted from installer + Expected Setup Agent. Got *kernel panic* instead. + Second and third reboot have landed me in text-mode Setup Agent.
3 I tried several things, each one of them ended in *kernel panic* either before logging in as root, or some minutes after. The panic appeared after idling the machine for some time.
4 A couple of strange things + I have found out that the default run level was set to 3. When, as a root I tried 'telinit 5', the machine responded with a blank screen. I had to reset. + Rebooting the machine was accompanied with messages regarding ntp/clock skew. Later, I have found out that I have lost the network connection, probably while playing with the installation, so this probably explains the clock skew. Am not sure if this has any relevance. + At no point I was prompted to setup a non-root user.
5 For each crash / kernel panic I got a screen-load of trace and other cryptic output. Each time, so it seems, the output was different. *Q* Is there a way to dump those messages into a file?
6 Only suspicious thing I have found in /var/log/messages was lines like this
May 19 11:27:36 bilbo kernel: ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 May 19 11:27:36 bilbo kernel: ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xb0 Emask 0x1 stat 0x51 err 0x4 (device error) May 19 11:27:36 bilbo kernel: ata1: EH complete
7 Also, /var/log/secure had these errors - I believe for every reboot.
... May 19 11:25:30 bilbo login: ROOT LOGIN ON tty1 May 19 11:26:06 bilbo login: pam_unix(login:session): session closed for user root May 19 11:26:09 bilbo sshd[2677]: Received signal 15; terminating. May 19 11:27:26 bilbo sshd[2687]: Server listening on :: port 22. May 19 11:27:26 bilbo sshd[2687]: error: Bind to port 22 on 0.0.0.0 failed: Address already in use. May 19 11:29:51 bilbo login: pam_unix(login:session): session opened for user root by LOGIN(uid=0) May 19 11:29:51 bilbo login: pam_selinux(login:session): Warning! Could not get new context for /dev/tty1, not relabeling: Invalid argument May 19 11:29:51 bilbo login: pam_selinux(login:session): usercon=(null), prev_context=system_u:object_r:tty_device_t May 19 11:29:51 bilbo login: ROOT LOGIN ON tty1
My *guess* is that the application related errors you reported may be a result of certain installation steps terminating early due to the false I/O errors reported by the kernel/driver(s).
HTH
Bill
Any recommendation how to proceed? (The most pressing question: is it the hardware? Should I take the box back to the seller?)
Many thanks.