I'm trying to run Redhat 9 with Gnome on an IBM Thinkpad 390e. Everything will run fine until I edit a config file, the files I'm trying to edit are:

/etc/xinetd.conf
/etc/services
/etc/profile

In /etc/xinetd.conf I'm adding the line:
swat stream tcp nowait.400 root /usr/sbin/swat swat

In /etc/services I'm adding:
swat 901/tcp

And in profile:
mount -t smbfs -o username=x,password=x //server/folder
/usr/folder

I know this is a really quick and dirty method for mounting an smb filesystem on boot, but since this is a laptop fstab won't work. Or it doesn't seem to, anyway. That is related to the PCMCIA config. But back to the original issue:

When any one of these files has been changed gnome won't start all the way. If it's either services or xinetd.conf I just get the redhat loading screen and nothing happens. If it's profile I don't even get the loading screen. The system appears to have frozen.

I can use crtl+alt+backspace to get back to the login, but that doesn't help much since I'm trying to run this computer, not look at a login screen. Any thoughts on what the hell is happening?

Hi,

First of all, is there any reason for manually configuring swat as you have done? RedHat's Swat package adds those lines itself and all you need do is add swat to the current runlevel and start it from RedHat's Service configurator. Either way, Swat isn't needed to mount another machine's share, just to configure your own shares.

The first problem is that the login manager (gdm) will execute /etc/profile first so a problem there will halt everything. I don't see anything wrong with the line you mention, but it would still be preferable to mount network shares in /etc/fstab. Here's how:

1. Add the approprite line to /etc/profile, to use the example you posted:
//server/folder /usr/folder smbfs defaults,rw,user,username=x,password=x,workgroup=x

2. This will only be mounted when the netfs service starts so you will need to make sure 'netfs' is added to your default runlevel and is started. You can do this from RedHat's Service Configuration program as well.

Those steps will take the pressure off Gnome, netfs is designed to try it's hardest to mount your network shares but it won't stop your computer if it fails.

The problem with putting that in /etc/profile is that _every_ time you login, it will try to mount that share again, without unmounting it. It may even help to put 'unmount //server/folder' first, as a last resort.

Hope it works out!

Regards,

Will

The reason I was mounting them from rc.local is that redhat 9 loads drivers in a completely nonsensical way so that when fstab is trying to mount the drives the pcmcia drivers aren't loaded and smb get's shot all to hell.

What's more, RH9 doesn't (or didn't at the time) support any version of smb fully, which caused the machine to freeze when I tried to mount more than one drive. The first drive would mount just fine, but the second drive froze the machine at boot and it wouldn't load gnome or anything beyond that point.

Which is all irrelevant anyway because I switched to Slackware after redhat went completely nuts and refused load any text in gnome at all. This was probably due to my experimentation with wine, but who cares? Slackware has been running flawlessly for the last two weeks.

Thanks, though. :-)

I had a similar problem, but I just wound up writing my own service. The only question I have now is, how do I make that service appear in redhat-service-config under gnome? Any ideas. . .?

That's way outta my league. . . :-)