A Mind Lost

I run a dedicated backup server who’s job it is to suck up all the data files from the other servers on a nightly basis to a hard drive and then transfer the lot to tape.  It’s been a little flakey lately so I’ve built a replacement which is, in line with other recent  changes, a smaller, quieter and altogether greener machine.

I needed to transfer some scripts from the old server to the new and discovered that the old server was not very happy that I had yanked it’s SCSI card and DAT drive.  It now failed to boot and gave me a segmentation fault instead.  Selecting the recovery option from the Debian GRUB prompt didn’t help so I resorted to a trusted method using SystemRescueCD which allowed me to boot from the CD then issue the following commands:

mkdir /mnt/hd

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/hd

This created a mount point and mounted the root hard drive partition to it.  This enabled me to get at the module config files in the server’s /etc directory.

vi /mnt/hd/etc/modules

This loaded up the modules list for boot-up and I simply deleted the aic**** line to remove the SCSI module.

A reboot later after removing the CD and everything is fine again.

I could complain that the aic**** module should handle such a simple error without segmenting and locking up the system and if I hadn’t figured out a work-around I probably would but since I use linux for free, it seems harsh to moan!