Running a web server with RH 8. It has been up2dated pretty regularly and the problem did not occur right after an update or something like that.
The problem is whenever I reboot the boot freezes right before it should be giving me a login prompt/screen. I can login remotely through SSH and the webserver is active and accessible. The only thing that is not working is the local console access. They are no failures or abnormailities in boot.log or any other log that relate to the booting.
Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions (other than giving it a good swift kick 'cause that didnt work ) would be helpful.


Brian

Go through your inittab.

What gives the login prompt is mingetty. You should have six of them running if you have the stock inittab from Red Hat.

Some of the things in inittab have actions like "wait", meaning "don't start up anything else until this one finishes". Since a lot of the stuff on boot needs to be run sequentially, that's usually desirable, but a potential downside is that if the thing being called doesn't end, you're left hanging there.

Since you can get in with ssh, it shouldn't be to difficult to track down.

Various tricks I'd use:

Look at the last few things in /etc/rc.d/rc<runlevel>.d. Are any of them still running?

Put a line at the end of each of the last several scripts that writes a "such-and-such done at $(date)" message out to a file in /tmp. If there are any you're missing once the system comes up, that one is your culprit.

Run a mingetty manually, and see if that allows to log in at the console. If so, there almost HAS to be something that is either preventing the RC scripts from finishing, or preventing init from getting down to the mingetty lines.

Hope this helps,

CHL

Yes it did help. It wasnt anything really in there though. I had forgotten that I had made a change to rc.local and that was causing the problem. Thanks though.