Re: renaming /etc/hostname...

From: Emil Petkov (emil.petkov_at_usa.net)
Date: 10/26/03 

Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 18:06:19 +0100

Barry Margolin wrote:
> In article <bnbr4o$vr6rj$1@ID-41250.news.uni-berlin.de>,
> Emil Petkov <emil.petkov@usa.net> wrote:
>
>>I have to share this story. The problem has been solved but it took some
>>hours and left our server dead for a night. I have read at several
>>places that in order to disable IPv6 on a Solaris box you have to rename
>>or remove the file /etc/hostname6.<interface>. Well yesterday night I
>>have decided to rename it (working remotely from home) and I had the
>>idea that a simple
>>
>># mv /etc/hostname6.eri0 /etc/hostname6.eri0.noipv6
>>
>>will do. After an attempt to reboot the box disappeared and never came
>>back untill got to it physically. Well as it appears the startup scripts
>>are written so that if there is a file beginning with 'hostname...' in
>>/etc they parse it and even manage to panic (instead of giving some
>>message and try to continue with what they've got right) if there is
>>something wrong with the suffixes. I havent thought about it. May be
>>there is some logic in this behavior. So you end up in single user mode
>>with nothing decently mounted.
>
>
> I'm not sure why it would panicked. The script expects the suffix to be
> the name of the interface to configure. So with the above file, it tries
> to do:
>
> ifconfig eri0.noipv6 ...
>
> or whatever the IPv6 equivalent of ifconfig is. If the suffix doesn't
> correspond to a valid interface name, I would expect this to print an error
> and then for the startup script to go on.

Well I reproduced the situation at home on my Solaris 9 box.

 From the console I can see that she complains of not being able to find
hostname6.eri0 and then a couple of errors creating and accessing
/var/adm/utmpx. After that the message to continue (Control-d) or enter
system maintenance mode comes. If I get in system maintenance mode I
have only / mounted read-only. (This was on Solaris 8 -- on my Solaris 9
box at this moment I got more file systems mounted read-only). This, of
course, and the following recovery steps can be done only if I have
physical access to the box.

E.P.