Last Modified: Sep. 25, 2011

Lab 4: Troubleshooting

The purpose of this lab is to practice troubleshooting skills. I have created a Trouble VM and made 5 copy of it named Trouble in your home directory on, cislab.cabrillo.edu. This VM is installed with Red Hat 9 Linux, and contains a shell scripted application called trouble which is executable by root only.

The trouble program offers 9 problems with booting the operating system - problems that pertain to the partition table and to the GRUB bootloader, and 9 problems associated with the rooting of the operating systems - problems with init and the rc scripts.

Following is the main screen of the trouble program: 

		The Gallery of Doom

	1) Problems with Booting
	2) Problems with Rooting
	3) Verify your fix
	4) Exit

	Choose your poison: _
After each problem is attempted, you must choose option 3 before going to the next problem. This will either verify that your fix was correct, or it will fix the problem for you. Therefore, you know that the system is back to normal before you try the next problem.
If you cannot fix a problem, but can at lease get back to the root login, the trouble program will fix it for you.

Booting Problems

Booting problems deal primarily with the master boot record and with Grub. Since a problem at this low level will most often preclude you from booting the system, you will need a rescue floppy to boot the system. Such a floppy already exists, floppy.flp, on nfsstore1 in the ISO folder. You will need to connect the floppy drive to your VM to boot from this floppy, and then you will need to remember to disconnect the floppy before starting the next problem, or you will never see the symptoms of the problem.

This floppy disk image also contains a copy of the MBR for the Trouble system in case you just have to replace all or parts of it.

Turn in

To turn in for this assignment, I want to receive a text file called lab4 that contains for each problem that you solved, 3 peices of information:
  1. the problem number e.g. b9 for the ninth boot problem,
  2. a description of the problem - what were the symptoms?
  3. a description of the solution - what you did to fix the problem.
You will get 2 points for each problem that you correctly describe and fix.