From: prophet@cheshire.oxy.edu (Dale LaFountain)
Subject: Re: HELP!  No login window!
Summary: yup
Organization: Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041 USA.
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1992 00:18:15 GMT

In article <1992Apr16.122038.3161@mwhhlaw.uucp> uunet!mwhhlaw!bob writes:
>prophet@cheshire.oxy.edu (Dale LaFountain) writes:
>> the login window wouldn't show up.
>
>I recently experienced the same problem.  For most of my machines, the  
>problem was solved by simply doing an rlogin from another machine on  
>the network.  However, for one, the problem turned out to be a missing  
>NextLibrary/Fonts file.  I discovered this problem by doing an rlogin  
>from another machine and then trying Edit -NXHost [whereiwas].  The  
>error message pointed me to the fact that some font files could not be  
>found.  When those were made available, the Login Panel also became  
>available.
>	
>	-Bob
>	Robert L. Hartley, Jr.
>	UUCP:	uunet!mwhhlaw!bob
>	ABA/net:	HARTLEYR
>	ATTMAIL:	attmail!mwhhlaw!bob
>-- 

Yes, Bob, you are exactly right.  We happened to change the mount
point for /NextLibrary, so Loginwindow couldn't find it.  Problem
fixed.

BUT WAIT!!!!


Now we are having more problems.  It started when I was fixing the
Net Printer with NetinfoManager.  I deleted an unneeded entry in the
NI directory /students/jaguar printers, and instead of deleting the
entry, it replaced my entry with 'dir:0'.  Recognizing this directory
as 'master', I luckily hesitated to delete this aberration.  I went
back to the Browser and made a backup of /etc/netinfo, and then
went back and deleted the printers directory, hoping that it wouldn't
follow the obviously corrupted pointer.  However, it did, and I lost
most of the Netinfo database.  So I restored it from a copy, and
rebooted, so as to restore the old database.  I played with a few more
things, and finally decided to just nuke the whole directory and snag
a fresh copy from /usr/lib/client/etc/netinfo.  I did that, keeping a
backup of the corrupted one.  

Upon a reboot, I get the message:

cannot load /etc/mach_init, errno 20
cannot load /etc/init, errno 20
{lots of other address error messages deleted}

panic>

Note that I did not touch either /etc/init or /etc/mach_init (both
links) nor did I touch /usr/etc/mach_init or /usr/etc/init (where the
two links point).  There are no mounts at this point in the boot
(about 5 seconds after the system test), so I don't think anything is
getting mounted on top of /usr.

To make matters worse, we tried making this damaged machine Netboot
from our Netinfo server (another slab), and now the Netinfo server is
getting the same errors (I don't know the exact detail of how this
happened as another admin was trying this).

Does ANYONE know what could have caused this problem, and how we may
be able to solve it?  The other three machines on our network (the NFS
server machine and two non-Netbooting clients) are all sitting with no
login window again.  The /NextLibrary/Fonts link comes from another 
subnet, so I don't think that it is being caused by that problem.

We have been in contact with NeXT, but are still waiting to be
'processed'.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.  Please email responses.

Thanks,

Dale LaFountain
-- 
Dale LaFountain  +1 (213)341-4275 Occidental
prophet@oxy.edu  Math Major '92,   College
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.sysadmin