Thanks to Mark Bergman <bergman@phri.nyu.edu>, the answer would seem
to be in the man page for mount. I thought I knew that man page by
heart, but there you go. The -m switch to the mount command tells
mount not to make an entry in the mnttab file. I haven't tried this
yet, since we fixed the problem after booting from CD (but as I said
earlier, this may not always be an option.) Also, since the
location is remote and the link to it slow, configuring the
wan/router gear to forward broadcasts so we can do net boots is
inpracticle.
To answer some of the other questions, there was filesystem
corruption, an fsck was done and the system rebooted. But since the
vfstab was fubar, the system booted in a strange state. I've been
told that under normal conditions, boot -sw should yield a writeable
root partition in single user, but not otherwise. I'll test this as
well and report back. I'll probably even test the trashed vfstab
file condition and attempt a recovery using mount -m -o rw,remount
/, etc. That couldn't be the exact command since vfstab wouldn't
(and didn't) have an entry for / in it, so something similar I
suppose.
Thanks again for the help. I'll send details of running through
this as soon as I get to it. It may not be this week though.
Cheers,
Richard
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:10 CDT