Story from the Shoot Yourself in the Foot Dept.

[Adam McDougall]

On Thu, 24 May 2001, Mark Szidik wrote:

>
> I got a new Sun Netra X1 server to replace some of our aging
> Sparc 5 systems.
>
> The X1's are pretty bare bones, but it is big storage and
> speed improvement over the old boxes.   Plus the $1170 price
> delived is hard to beat.
>
> The bad part: 5400 RPM IDE drive, no SCSI, no CD ROM
>
> Well I had the box just humming along installing all the good
> GNU tools and after I install the bash shell I got smart and
> changed /etc/passwd for my UID and root to default to the bash
> shell.
>
> I didn't happen to notice that root entry for the shell was
> /sbin/sh so I accidentally changed the entry to /sbin/bash.
> WOOPS!  there is no bash in /sbin.  So my system is hosed, no
> root access!
>
> Man this sucks.  Foot really hurts when you put a .45 through it.
>
> So I am thinking that Linux is pretty good with mounting other
> FS's.  Sure enough 'man mount' on RH 7.1 says it'll mount UFS
> file systems.   So pulled the drive from the Sun box, slapped it into
> my Linux box and booted.  For the life of me I cannot get the
> darn drive to mount.  Here is what I get no matter what
> combination of options I try:
>
> ]# mount -t ufs -o ufstype=sun /dev/hdb1 /s
> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb1,
>        or too many mounted file systems
>        (could this be the IDE device where you in fact use
>        ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)
>
>
> So I think I need to re-comple the kernel with UFS support.  Does
> that make sense?

I cannot really comment on the solution you are trying to do except
mention that Suns are big endian and pc's are little endian so you may
want to look out for Big Endian UFS support of some sort.  Also, is there
any way you could get a root shell on the X1 with some sort of bootable
media?  I assume it supports netboot even if it has no other local media,
so you could setup some combo of bootp/tftp/nfs if you wanted to try
netbooting it so you could mount and repair the local problem.


>
>
> -Mark
>
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