[wellylug] Boot error "INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast:"(SOLVED - WOO HOO!)

[Phillip Rose]

Thanks, Ewen, for your detailed response. The "voilà" part of your response
is excerpted below:

At 22:45 02/09/03 +1200, Ewen McNeill wrote:
>In message <4.1.20030902222301.01ae38b0 at pop3.paradise.net.nz>, Phillip Rose 
>writes:
>>INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>>INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
(...)

>My gut feeling is that either you've lost some of your library files (or
>have mismatching versions of them) or that something has happened to one
>of the files that most programs want to read.  (I guess on a modern
>system damage to the PAM setup could also do it too -- check /etc/pam.*)

Go with the gut feeling, Ewen! It turns out that my problem was to do with
a known issue with RH up2date, glibc*.rpms, and i686 or Athlon systems.
Briefly, an "i686" rpm is required for one of the packages, not the "i386"
package that the RH up2date manager will tell you that you need. This seems
like a pretty significant bug in the up2date system to me. The up2date
database on the RH network knows that I have an Athlon processor, yet the
up2date network program tells me to update glibc* packages with the wrong
rpm. A useful URL on this topic is:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/5/2003/05/4/57607

( BTW, I am aware that there other superior Linux distros and superior
package managers. This latest episode will encourage me in that direction.
;-)   )

I had actually seen posts on one of the RH maillists to do with this bug,
but my system's symptoms were unlike other ones mentioned, so it wasn't
until your reply that I started to investigate that possibility.

Thanks again!

--Phillip Rose