Please help!! I am new to this forum and somewhat new to linux and found myself in a terrible bind...hoping someone here can help out!

Here goes:

-I have a FC3 server running apache, bind, mysql, etc etc.
-I tried compiling and installing Turck MMCache today to speed up php scripts
-I ran the command = export PHP_PREFIX="/usr/bin" per the readme of that script as root

I had a problem following through because I didn't have the proper php dev tools and so I went along doing my other work.
I come back to it an hour or so later and my site doesn't come up....
I have no dns resolution-
I cannot login via ssh- it logged me in and than just shut down the program
I luckily have webmin running and that comes up fine..however-dns server is down and will not start up...
any logs I have are not viewable...
hardly anything works in webmin...

So I call my co-locater and have them reboot
(they also tell me that setting that env variable shouldn't have done anything like this?)

Now the server will not even start up
I get the following errors...

Exec of init (/sbin/init) failed!!!: 2
umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
Kernal panic- not synching: attempted to kill init!

So I pull my box and take it home, try booting off a RH8 boot disk and get errors of...

Ext3-FS: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode
Freeing unused kernal memory: 212k freed
Warning! Unable to open initial console
Kernal panic: no init found try passing init=option to kernal


Cannot boot to linux single or anything

Please help!! any ideas? This is a production server and is killing me!
Thanks to everyone in advance

1. It's spelled kernel, not kernal.
2. How are you trying to boot off of the RH8 disk; in rescue mode or with the FC3 kernel or something else? (Use the rescue mode.) You should really own a FC3 boot disk if you have a FC3 production server.
3. Your hardware has probably broken down or the filesystem on your hard disk is corrupted. These are the kind of situations where having a boot partition may be helpful. Use fsck to check the filesystems.

Welcome to LQ!

Regards
Simon

Well here is a followup to the situation....

I swapped out the CDROM and booted into recovery mode on FC3 disk-

I was able to do:
$:umount hda5
$:fsck hda5 and got no errors returned

but still no luck. It appears the FS is Ok.

I was thinking...
I have all of my customer/hosting sites on my /home partition and wondering if I do a reinstall of FC3, and I specify to leave that partition and not format...if I can essentially just reinstall the OS "around" my customer data???

I would still have to reconfigure my whole systems and also reset permissions but for the most part I would think it would work? Any advise/ideas on this?

Fsck is used like this: /sbin/fsck -c /dev/hda5. If you don't specify the -c option, it doesn't do much anything. With the -c it checks if the disk is broken or the filesystem messed up (you might not see it by browsing the directories.) Repeat with every partition.

Yes, leaving a /home partition is very possible. When the installer asks you if you want it to do partitioning for you, select manual partitioning. Then specify some partition as root ("/"), select all the mountpoints, and don't format any partition you don't have to. I'm not sure but I think Fedora offers some kind of repair install mode also. Still, if I were in your place, I'd try to back up the customer data as soon as possible. Some piece of hardware may be broken, such as motherboard or IDE/SCSI/RAID controller, and installing an OS isn't the safest thing to do.

One thing to try is just installing and configuring the kernel and GRUB (boot loader) again. This may not be the easiest process if you're not very familiar with such things.

Maybe it has something to do with it.
I run FC3, too, And I had the "kernel panic - not syncing" message. I then tried to boot with an older kernel version, and it worked fine.
I still have to change the boot-kernel version every boot;-)
Maybe it helps.

fc3 has issues with kernel upgrades, revert to an older version