SUMMARY: Nobody can login our productive server

9 Out of office

Thank you very much to every one who take a minute to respond my mail (in
order of appearance):
Steve Maher
Bruntel, Mitchell (not very constructive ;-))
Hichael Morton
Carl Ma
Richard Markham
Davorin Bengez
Mario Williams
Kris Briscoe
Darren Dunham
David Markovitz
Eugene Schmidt
Brett Lymn

------------------------
First of all:
almost all say it is very important that root has sh shell as explained by
Davorin:
"you should have /sbin/sh for root's shell as it is statically linked - does
not depend on any external library; this time not a big issue but other time
around..."

And by Eugene:
"On another note, root "should actually" usr /usr/sbin/sh - statically
linked. Even if a library used by ksh gets clobbered, u are still down ;-("


In this way and if you want to  or have to work in ksh Brett Lymn suggests
two ways:
"1) have a shell function that execs a new shell of your choice..DO NOT
   automatically exec this shell on login as this will break your root
   login regardless of what you do - make it a manual process, make it
   as short as you like (e.g. k execs /usr/bin/ksh for you) but you
   must make it a manual action.

2) create another account with uid 0 and a shell of /usr/bin/ksh and
   use that to do day to day root work and keep the real root login
   for emergencies."

------------------------------

And now the SUMMARY for may original question: "...is there a better way to
do this in order to reduce the time in then the server is down?. I mean to
reduce the reboots (4 in my version)."
And Darren tell me two ways:

"I wouldn't have unencapsulated it.  There are a couple of ways to
handle this..

1) (no touch disks)
Make the change on both disks, then boot to single user.  Use VxVM
commands to detach (det) one side of the root mirror, then reboot.  The
remaining mirror will have fsck run on it, and the other mirror will be
reattached.  Pretty quick, no big deal.

2) (touch disks)
While the machine is down, remove, power-off, or otherwise disconnect
one disk from the root mirror.  Mount the remaining and fix the link,
then boot the machine.  When it boots, it'll mark the plexes on the
other half as stale.  Replace the disk, and add the plexes back, and
it'll remirror."

the first way don't seems to be possible for me, because I can't change the
mirrored disk, because it hasn't partitions, just volumes. But the second
way sounds very good. I have a test machine with VxVM and I'll test it. I
like this solution, very original.

Also some of you tell me that SUN recommends using disksuite to mirror the
boot drives and not VxVM. But I think SDS has the same problem as VxVM,
perhaps easily commands, but no reduction of time (I'll be wrong, I don't
know very much about SDS).

A college suggest to give root permission to one user (my user) for a useful
command (maybe chmod) using sudo. I know that's not very standard but in
this case (that I had an opened session with my user) I would chmod the /
partition for me, recreate the links and chmod again for root. 

So, again thank you everybody, this list is great,
Virginia

>  -----Mensaje original-----
> De: 	Marques, Virginia  
> Enviado el:	jueves, 26 de junio de 2003 15:34
> Para:	'sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org'
> Asunto:	Nobody can login our productive server
> 
> One person this morning did a rm * on / partition with user root. After
> that no one can login to the server this person logoff before notifying us
> what he did.
> The problem was that no one has access to ksh because in the / partition
> there is a link that was removed:
> 
> #pwd
> /
> #ls -l bin
> lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           9 Jun 26 09:35 bin -> ./usr/bin
> 
> and every user in my /etc/passwd has the shell /bin/ksh (also root)
> 
> We decided to ask the customer to shutdown the server in order to start-up
> from cdrom, recreate the links and start-up again. But the main problem is
> that we have VxVM with encapsulated boot disk(s). So we had to:
> 
> - Shutdown (Stop-A) 
> - Ok> Boot cdrom -sw
> - mount / partition: 
> 	#mount -F ufs /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /a
> - recreate removed links
> 	# cd /a
> 	# ln -s ./usr/bin bin
> 	# ln -s ./usr/lib lib
> - Now comes the VxVM section we had to modify /etc/system and /etc/vfstab
> files in order to tell VxVM not to start. And also in directory
> /etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d we had to:
> 
> 	# rm root-done
> 	# touch install-db
> 	# init 0
> 		ok> boot disk
> 
> - Next step: encapsulate boot disk with vxinstall and leave other disks
> alone.
> - After two more reboots system is up with VxVM now we had to mount all
> other partitions and customers begin to work again.
> 
> (now we have to initialise three other disks we had in rootdg and make the
> boot disk mirror)
> 
> 
> That all took 50 minutes. My question is (and please, excuse the long mail
> and the bad English): is there a better way to do this in order to reduce
> the time in then the server is down?. I mean to reduce the reboots (4 in
> this version).
> 
> Kind regards,
> Virginia
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers