Re: 'chown' of translator causes "Bought the Farm" error

[Brent A. Fulgham]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 06:12:17AM -0400, Roland McGrath wrote:
> There actually might be several bugs here and I can't tell exactly which
> things are biting you.
> 
> > Now, if I change the ownership of the translator:
> > 
> > chown root.root /dev/hd0s4
> 
> Can you verify that this actually changed the behavior of who is permitted
> to read the device as it should?
> 

Yes -- if I set the permissions to "root.bfulgham", everything works fine
until I reboot (I imagine the existing translator continues working until
a reboot occurs, or perhaps a "settrans -fg", but I did not test this.)

After reboot, the system complains:

/sbin/fsck.ext2:  Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short
read while trying to open /dev/hd0s7
Could this be a zero-length partition?
Automatic boot failed... help!

If I then tried to list:

%> ls /home
ext2fs: /dev/hd0s7: panic: main device too small for superblock (0 bytes)
ls /home: Translator died.

If I remove the translator:

%> settrans -fg /home

Then add a new one:

%> settrans -c /home /hurd/ext2fs /dev/hd0s7

It lists properly and no longer complains about /dev/hd0s7.

Unfortunately, I can't recreate the "Computer Bought the Farm" error.

Perhaps it was due to me performing a blanket modification of ownerships
from the root partition:

chown -R root.root *

It actually segfaults in the /dev partition, which pretty much forces a
reboot.

Perhaps it got far enough in the /dev partition to trash something
important, which actually caused the "Bought the Farm" crash.  Because
otherwise it seems to work just fine today.

Thanks,

-Brent