System boot hangs at system message bus
 

I'm loading a system from kickstart, and when the RHEL 5.1.19.6 desktop OS trys to boot, it gets stuck at system logger (but eventually fails and continues), then gets completely gets stuck at system message bus. Doing interactive boot, I can skip system message bus, but then gets stuck at autofs and cups.

One work around I've tried with success was to boot into maintance mode, and ran the authconfig-tui command, disabled the "Use LDAP" option under "User Information" section. I was then able to login as root to the GUI that way, then go back in to authconfig-tui, recheck the option for "Use LDAP", rebooted, and then logged in with my user account fine.

However, since I will be using this kickstart to load many other machines, I was wondering if there was a way to avoid doing this every time, and going to the source of the problem. If anyone has any suggestions it would be greatly appreciate. Thanks.

IMHO *exact* loglines (dmesg, syslog, application-specific logs) are worth more than a thousand lines of whatever describing a problem...

Didn't really find anything in those logs... However, I was able to get through the boot process by adding my host name and ip address to the 'hosts' file. It boots almost fine, up in till it gets to NFS mount, where it hangs for a little bit and eventually passes. Does anyone know anything about this?

Solution

NFS was failing to mount do to network problems. I was getting a bunch of dropped packets. My switch that I was connected to was running 10 MBs full duplex, while my nic card was at 10 MBs half. I used the ethtool to set it to match the switch speed. It solved my problem.