[lug] Strange Red Hat experience

[D. Stimits]

Peter Hutnick wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just lost power to my home "server" and when it came back up I couldn't
> connect via SSH or HTTP.  I could ping, so I knew that it was back up. 
> Sooo, I drug the monitor up from the basement and plugged it in. 
> Everything looked fine.  Restarted services, fsck, yada, yada.  Still no
> love.
> 
> Finally I look at what daemons are running, and damned if ipchains and
> iptables weren't running.  I don't run them normally, and don't have them
> configured for my environment (i.e. to let SSH and HTTP through).  (Please
> send chiding emails to /dev/null)  WTF?  I have had other power failures
> and every thing has come up roses in the past.
> 
> Can anyone offer a rational explanation?
> 
> -Peter
> 
> 
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What filesystem types are involved? I will assume Redhat for filesystem 
structure, probably the parts I am thinking of are similar layout for 
other distros, YMMV.

If lock files are left over (check /var/lock/subsys/), then a startup of 
a service such as ipchains or httpd could fail (those are just for sake 
of argument, I do not know how their scripts deal with stale locks). In 
particular, postgresql is this way, at least on RH 7.1. I had to rewrite 
parts of the init script to deal with daemons not active but subsys 
locked. To see this, one had to cd to /etc/rc.d/init.d/ (use whichever 
init.d directory your system uses), and run "./postgresql status". When 
it says service is stopped but subsystem is locked, you need to go to 
/var/lock/subsys/, and remove the stale lock, then run "./whatever start".

D. Stimits, stimits AT idcomm.com