RHEL 4 ES running on vSphere 4.1

it looks like someone tried to upgrade vmware tools. now the system won't boot.

everything looks fine to me except that /var is completely empty so that's causing syslogd to shit the bed. it's on the root partition, and from what i can see, was never on its own partition... so i have no idea where it went.

any ideas? this is a new one for me.

1/6/2011 1:40:40 PM

every time i get frustrated with Microsoft Hyper-V Server somebody posts something bad happening with their vmware setup. makes me feel a little better about my stuff being whack

1/6/2011 2:36:54 PM

holy shit, to have the entire /var directory to go missing is


do you have any backups? have you tried any forensic recovery tools?


Otherwise, probably a reinstall might be needed.

1/6/2011 3:05:23 PM

Hyperv clusters can suck my ass. Hard to tell what happened to var without being on the box and poking around. One thing that does come into mind is if var was a network mount and it's unmounted but I'm sure you've checked that. Otherwise I hope you have a snapshot of the server before it was jacked up.

1/6/2011 7:17:43 PM

^^^this was mainly due to user stupidity and the wrong people having root access. i keep telling people that shit like this is what happens when you update things you have no clue about, haha.

^^haha, that's basically what i said to the sysadmin who asked me to look at this for him at work today

don't think they have any backups, but i can just mount it ro once they reinstall so they can get at least part of their stuff back.

^if var was a network mount, i would just make a :carlface: and ignore this, haha. we'd be having quite a few other problems considering syslogd inits before eth0, IIRC.

1/6/2011 9:51:25 PM

Probably obvious, but sometimes I miss the simplest things - Is the volume for /var mounted, or are you just looking at the /var mountpoint?

1/7/2011 9:32:32 AM

^

Quote :

"it's on the root partition, and from what i can see, was never on its own partition"

nothing in fstab, and i don't see it as either an LV or as a partition in fdisk

1/7/2011 9:40:39 AM

post your resolution though whenever you decide a course of action.

[Edited on January 8, 2011 at 9:25 AM. Reason : I GOT NO /VAR!]

1/8/2011 9:24:13 AM

i can't imagine a vmware tools upgrade would erase /var.

look through user's .bash_history for rm -rf /var ?

[Edited on January 9, 2011 at 12:27 AM. Reason : .]

1/9/2011 12:26:35 AM

^have you ever looked at their setup script? it does a LOT of weird shit that hoses installs all the time, haha... especially with RHEL 4 and SUSE.

ended up just telling them to restage and salvage what they could off of it because i don't have time to figure out wtf happened.

1/9/2011 11:20:03 AM

lol

1/10/2011 2:43:06 PM