Summary: Problems with root filesystem writes

Hi,

I received several suggestions to try FSCKing the drives. I had
already tried that to no avail. Since this is occuring on the first
boot of the system after several clean OS installations, it seems
likely that it's a larger problem.

After my initial posting, I dug out some older Solaris 10 media from
our last EduSoft update and installed with them. The exact behaviour
doesn't repeat. However, now it refuses to start X and I can't login;
literally. When I type "root" at the console login, it tells me it
can't find a bunch of PAM files and then goes back to a login prompt
before ever even reaching the password prompt. Single user mode
doesn't work and booting off a CD to a command prompt and working with
the drive shows file corruption all over the place. I also used the
media to install on an E420R and that installation worked perfectly.

At this point it's looking much more like a hardware issue so I'm
going to try some different drives and if that doesn't solve it, I'll
just send the workstation back for a replacement.

The original question:

> Hi All,
>
> I've got a problem with a new Sun Blade 1000 machine I setup. It's
> Solaris 10 update 1(1/06). Nobody, including root, can write to the
> root filesystem. Other slices are fine. People can write to /usr,
> /home, etc, etc, etc just fine.
>
> / is mounted read-write as shown in the "mount" command with /usr for
> comparison:
>
> / on /pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@4/fp@0,0/disk@w21000004cfe6917c,0:a
> read/write/setuid/devices/dev=1d80008 on Wed Dec 31 16:00:00 1969
> /usr on /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s3
>
read/write/setuid/devices/intr/largefiles/logging/xattr/onerror=panic/dev=1d8
000b
> on Sun Feb 26 14:43:17 2006
>
> However, comparing it to /usr, you can see several differences. First,
> it's the actual hardware path that is mounted instead of the link in
> /dev which then normally points to the hardware path in /devices.
> Second, it shows the mount date as the beginning of the UNIX clock. I
> would think that even if the clock was starting when the system first
> got AC power, it would at least be 15-20 seconds of runtime until it
> got around to mounting disks. You can also see logging is not enabled
> on /. I was under that belief that UFS logging was enabled by default
> on all UFS filesystems in Solaris 10.
>
> The appropriate entries out of /etc/vfstab:
>
> /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s0       /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s0      /       ufs     1
>  no      -
> /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s3       /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s3      /usr    ufs     1
>  no      -
>
> I tried reinstalling the OS and the same behaviour is occuring on both
installs.
>
> Does anyone have any ideas what is causing this?

Thanks for the suggestions and time!

Thanks,
   -Aaron Taylor
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