On Thu, 9 Oct 1997, Alastair Gregory wrote:
> I have an odd problem with my Debian system. When
> it boots up into multi-user mode, it "automatically" logs in
> as 'root' on the first console. It's impossible to terminate
> the session, as a new one starts immediately after I exit
> the shell. It's in run level 2 and the other consoles behave
> normally.
>
> Another problem I have is that the machine won't reboot
> by itself. If I "telinit 6", it shuts down, then sits there
> without rebooting until I hit the reset button. Is this an
> AMD quirk?
>
> I loaded Debian 1.3 on an old AMD 486-80 based
> machine. It seemed to load properly, except that a
> number of utilities were not present (such as 'dselect',
> "mesg", "start-stop-daemon"). I was a bit dubious, but
> not having loaded Debian for a while (last time it was
> at 1.0, I think) I just assumed I wasn't up with the
> latest developments. I scrounged a dselect binary which
> ran, but no access methods were available so I was
> no better off.
>
> The autologin phenomenon didn't manifest itself until I
> tried reinstalling the base system from the boot diskettes.
> On booting from the hard disk after this, it asked me to
> pick a root password, but after the "passwd" dialog,
> it'd say "Try again" and run "passwd" again. I flipped to
> another console, logged in as a mere user, su'ed and killed
> the passwd and bash processes, and ran "passwd" manually
> to set the root password. Now I have the autologin problem
> but "dselect" seems to be OK.
>
> My guess is that part(s) of the Debian load process didn't
> complete, or failed silently. Can anyone shed light on this?
> Could I somehow have bad install disks and not know it?
>
It is entirely possible that you got a bad set of disks, although there
should have been a complaint from the installation script.
Because you killed the initial start up script, it didn't get removed, so
you get stuck in it every time you boot. (this is probably what is causing
the "auto login") Look in /root for something called setup.sh (I think
that's the name...). There are also two other files that are "mangled" for
the install. One is bash_profile and the other is one of the init scripts.
Look through /etc for files with a .real extention. Copy these files over
their "proper" counterparts and delete the setup.sh in /root and you
should see more what you expect from the console. I suspect that you
didn't get a clean first install, and you should probably build a new set
of disks and try again.
Luck,
Dwarf
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