RE: rescue root floppy

[Alan Wood <alan wood abfl co uk>]

Jack Wrote :
>Dear Alpha Linux folks,
>
>I've been struggling in vain to make a set of rescue floppies for my
>alpha linux machines, following the instructions in the
>Bootdisk.HOWTO.  Of course, that was written by someone running
>Slackware on an Intel system, so I can't follow it to the letter.  I'm
>using SRM firmware and aboot.  The boot floppy works fine, and the
>compressed root floppy appears to load into the ramdisk and mount
>successfully, up to the point where it gives me a login prompt.  When I
>type in the user name (root), however, it immediately dies, writing
>"Login incorrect" for a barely visible instant at the bottom of the
>screen, then something respawns and I get another login prompt, and the
>same thing happens.  It never asks for a password.
>
>My best guess is that I've left out some critical executable or .so file,
>or that I have something wrong in the scripts under rc.d.
>
[snip]

My reckoning is that you are missing /bin/login or one of it's .so files.

$ ldd /bin/login
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x0000015555558000)
        libpam.so.0 => /lib/libpam.so.0.57 (0x000001555565c000)
        libpam_misc.so.0 => /lib/libpam_misc.so.0.57 (0x0000015555764000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x0000015555868000)
        /lib/ld.so.1 => /lib/ld.so.1 (0x0000000000000000)

As this uses PAM, it may need the /etc/pam.* files, and if these reference 
any of the PAM modules, then these will need to be in /lib/security. 


Alan Wood