[ale] 2 strange problems have me stumped

[Dow Hurst]

I'll only address number one in general way as I have little experience
with USB:

Under IRIX there is a media daemon for managing removable media such as
CDs, DAT, and Zip drives.  It automounts and umounts such filesystems on
the fly.  Mediad nevers updates /etc/fstab, only /etc/mtab via the
"mount" program.  USB being hot swappable and inherently expected to be
swapped, I wonder if the USB module tries to act similar to the media
daemon idea.  The fact that an entry in /etc/fstab is created
automagically (did I read your email correctly?) points to a daemon type
management of the process.  Since you are rebooting, the proper
procedure would be for the USB module to remove the entry in /etc/fstab
upon shutdown and rewrite it upon startup based on what is connected at
startup.  Right?
Dow

"James P. Kinney III" wrote:
> 
> OK Alers. These have me stumped.
> 
> 1) Brand new RedHat 7.2 install will all the patches and upgrades. The
> box is a Dell optiplex P4 1.7GHz. There is an external usb hard drive.
> According to /proc/bus/usb, it gets connected as /dev/sda. No problem.
> Make a mount point (/mnt/lacie) and mount the drive. It works just fine.
> So an entry in fstab is created. umount the drive and remount using the
> fstab listing. It is OK. Now do the acid test and reboot (sync; shutdown
> -r now). The mount point is gone. The fstab entry is also gone. Repeat
> the fstab and mount point and mount it OK. un mount it OK. reboot after
> another sync and checking that both are written. They are both gone
> again. Is there a usb-storage device problem that trashes /etc/fstab
> listing for itself?
> 
> 2) Dell Poweredge 1300 with the AMI Megaraid PERC2/SC scsi raid card.
> Under RH7.1 all was well. Upgrade to RH7.2(before I got there). Now the
> drive shows up as sdb, no longer sda. So the drive(s) were wiped and a
> fresh install applied. Won't boot. Hangs at the grub/lilo screen (both
> tried). The megaraid card is recognized and used during setup. From the
> boot floppy, it croaks with "failed to mount /". The grub listing from
> the install showed the raid5 logical drive as sdb* partitions. I would
> like to keep the raid5 setup as this will eventually be a production
> box. What is going on? The megaraid card shows as being initialized by
> the boot floppy kernel. The hard drive boot never gets to the kernel.
> The raid 5 is composed of x3 18G ultra2 scsi drives. I forget the slice
> size. The logical drive is configured to boot from drive 0. Is that
> going to set the MBR for the logical device to be on the first slice of
> drive 0? Since the card presents the logical drive as sda, I shouldn't
> need to specify any thing about this being a raid setup. RH7.1 shows it
> as sda. RH7.2 as sdb. Ideas?
> --
> James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
> President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
> Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
> 770-493-8244             \.___________________________./
> 
> GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
> <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
> Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
> 
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-- 
__________________________________________________________
Dow Hurst                   Office: 770-499-3428
Systems Support Specialist  Fax:    770-423-6744
1000 Chastain Rd.
Chemistry Department SC428  Email:dhurst at kennesaw.edu
Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com
Kennesaw, GA 30144
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