Hey!

Today I was really stupid. I used the services located in the server settings tab (menu>server settings>services) and I enabled http becuase I wanted to play around with the web server. But, then I went off on a tangent selecting anything that I was curious about. Later when I rebooted my system, everything went fine till the login screen. It comes to the text based login and the screen starts to flicker and I can't enter anything. As you can see, i'm a novice because if I was a pro I wouldn't be on this "general" forum.

Other things I saw before it happened:

--XMMS decided to change its skin
--during the shutdown, one of things said: failed

Help!

Peace,

Neo

Ouch! You may have started some wierd service that doesn't agree with your system hardware.

Are you able to login to a console (you know.. text only) session? If so, take a look at the file /etc/inittab and look for the `initdefault' record. Or just type in:

grep ^id /etc/inittab | cut -d: -f2

That'll give you your default run level. It should be `3' or `5'. Then, look in the directory `/etc/rc.d/rcN.d' where `N' is the run level. Can you post the contents of that directory? The files in that directory that begin with `S' are links that point to the scripts that start the services when the system is booting. For example, the `S' links in my rc3.d directory are:

S00microcode_ctl
S05kudzu
S10network
S12syslog
S13portmap
S14nfslock
S17keytable
S20random
S24pcmcia
S25netfs
S28autofs
S55sshd
S56rawdevices
S56xinetd
S58ntpd
S60lpd
S60nfs
S80sendmail
S85gpm
S85httpd
S85postgresql
S90crond
S90xfs
S95anacron
S95atd
S97rhnsd
S99local

I suspect that your list is longer.

It might be useful to grab a copy of /var/log/dmesg, /var/log/boot.log as well as a listing of the scripts in /etc/rc.d/init.d.

If things are munged up to the point that you cannot get X up and running so that you can run the Service Configuration tool and turn some of the services off, you can disable some of the services via a text console by making them `hidden' (i.e.: `mv S09isdn .S09isdn') and they won't be started at the next boot.

If you cannot get logged in, you may have to resort to booting from your distribution CD. It usually allows you to boot the system from the CD and mount your root partition (say, on /mnt) so you can repair whatever sillyness is making the system boot up incorrectly. In this case, the directory you would be fixing would be /mnt/etc/rcN.d (where, again, N = run level).

For future reference: it's probably best to turn on no more than one service at a time unless you know exactly what that service does and why you need it turned on.

If you can't get logged in, you may have to do this while in single user mode. When the `boot:' prompt appears, just enter `linux single' (or what ever label is associated with your main boot kernel. This'll do a basic startup, mount filesystems and not much else. None of the services have started yet so you could make any fixes that you need to and, when you're done, proceed to multiuser mode by pressing `^D'.

Good luck. Post a reply if you have any questions...

Wassapp,

For a moment I thought nobody would reply but you linux guys are not only fast but nice. Makes me motivated to learn more with all those detailed explanations. Thanks a lot, i'm trying it out. Thank god I kept a Windows Box for these disasters.

Also, if you can answer another question. I want to set up a simple server to host my website (my design portfolio etc) and in the future I want my web server to do server side scripting. How do I get my server rollin' with all these things? Do I use services? And how do do them properly so that I don't screw my my hardware?
I'm eager to learn, so if you guys could help, that would be great.

Peace,

Depends on the type of server-side scripting you want to do. Redhat 8 rolls out of the box with apache configured to support php,perl,python and all those good things. Just check if you have them installed:
rpm -q apache
rpm -q php
etc...

If they are not installed they will be on your install disks. Apache is a service that can be configured to start at boot time. The others are not services, that is they don't run in the background, they just grind code when a script calls them.

If you have troubles getting them up and running post in a new thread with an appropriate title.

Good luck.

i had a problem with apache and php i installed them reboot the machine and apache did not start always fail without a reason ayn suggestions.

Okay, back to the services problem. When I boot my computer, all goes fine (no screen flicker, no nothing) till I reach the login stage (the starts to flicker at this time, it can't reach the graphical login stage, and I can barley enter anything because of the screen). Is there any other way of getting into my computer (into shell prompt) and solve the problem or if it can't be solved, backup my files.

I also want to know whether there is a way to automatically save you're files on a remote server (such as xdrive.com) the way one saves to his/her home directory.

ok, when you get to the lilo screen press escape and enter "linux init 3" and that should boot you to a normal login without X. i owuld *guess* that maybe you've turned of xfs for one, as that will stop X running. so use "service xfs status" to see what that's up to and all otehr relevant services.

I don't think I have lilo as my boot loader.

________________________
My system profile:

-Redhat Linux 8.0
-Personal Edition
-normal boot loader (what ever was selected by default)
-ext3 filesystem

well just press that I for Interactive loading and don't load the X login manager

then it asks me if i want to start kaduz and select the services i want to start but then i still goes to x login and the screen still flickers

also, if i can't pull this off, how can you go about backing up your files from the shell prompt (i would like to ftp it to a server or put it on my second computer which has windows and is networked on a windows home network)

lftp is a command line ftp client. Check out man lftp. cp=copy mv=move