🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi all,

I screwed things up on my standalone Station this morning after
attempting to install the windowPackage.ps hack posted here 24 Oct, but
managed to fix the problem in about 45 minutes (the time it took me to
figure out I needed to interrupt the boot/init process to access the
shell as root and restore the original windowPackage.ps).

(Yes, I was aware of the warning to "create a possibility to boot from
another drive"... )

Anyway, wanted to share my experience to those who haven't (yet) had
this sort of problem, epsecially you folks with standalones *without*
that precious "nother drive". All this info is in the "Network and
System Administration" book[let] NeXT provided with my Station.

My problem was I accidentally mangled the
/usr/lib/NextStep/windowPackage.ps file, so when I rebooted my
Station... BEHOLD! There was no login screen and *no* way to log in!

My Station is set to "verbose test mode", and after observing the
messages at each step of the boot process (several times) I knew it was
time to hit the ROM monitor, because I *knew* there was a way to
interrupt the boot process and access the shell...

Well, ultimately I realized I had to reconfigure the paramaters (type
"p") in the ROM monitor so that the boot command made the machine to boot
in single-user mode (include the "-s" flag).

After doing this, it was a simple matter of rebooting (again) and typing
<CONTROL>-<C> a few times to halt the process, and there I was at the
UNIX command line, free to restore windowPackage.ps to its good old
former self. (Of course, after making sure all was really OK, I restored
the boot command (again in ROM mon) to boot in multiuser mode, which
prevents such interactive access to UNIX.)

If I were a destructive sort, I could have deleted a bunch of important
files, or changed root's password, etc., etc.

If you have a machine in a public area (such as a lab), I *strongly*
suggest you establish a password for the ROM monitor. Likewise, set
"Allow any ROM commands even if password protected" to "NO".

Well... this experience wasn't too bad, compared to the hours it took me
to fix problems mounting DOS disks (there was a bad link... UGH!...
learn by immersion... long story. ;^p )

--
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+
| Adam Schwartz  | W: 919-515-5424  | ASCII mail only, please. 
| adam@ncsu.edu  |    (Raleigh, NC) | 
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