[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#638341: initscripts: Boot fails: Permission denied (Read-only file system)

[Kingsley G. Morse Jr.]

Package: initscripts
Version: 2.88dsf-13.11
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system


The initscripts package normally does a fine job
of orchestrating many diverse and important
resources.

The main reason I'm writing is that after
upgrading and re-booting, many, many errors
appeared on the system console, including

    Permission denied

    Read-only file system

    unable to open pidfile

    module <you name it> not found

    /etc/init.d/rc: line 150: /etc/rcS.d/S10checkroot.sh Permission denied

If I recall correctly, I also saw errors something like

    hostname: Unknown host (none)

As you might imagine, the computer made Charlie
Sheen look stable.

I rebooted the computer with a live CD, either
Puppy Linux or System Rescue CD, chrooted to the
hard drive, and saw that several init scripts lacked
permission to be executed.

I listed them with

    $ ls -l $(dpkg -L initscripts | egrep "init.d" | egrep sh)

and saw lines like

    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9398 Jul 13 14:11 /etc/init.d/checkroot.sh

So I did a 

    $ chmod 755 <init script name>

on the init scripts that needed permission to
execute, and rebooted.

It seemed to work.

The bad news?

How the scripts lost execute permission is a
mystery.

I hope this humble bug report helps others,
Kingsley

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.0.0-1-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages initscripts depends on:
ii  coreutils                  8.5-1         GNU core utilities
ii  debianutils                4.0.2         Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  libc6                      2.13-16       Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  lsb-base                   3.2-27        Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  mount                      2.19.1-5      Tools for mounting and manipulatin
ii  sysv-rc                    2.88dsf-13.11 System-V-like runlevel change mech
ii  sysvinit-utils             2.88dsf-13.11 System-V-like utilities

Versions of packages initscripts recommends:
ii  e2fsprogs          1.42~WIP-2011-07-02-1 ext2/ext3/ext4 file system utiliti
ii  psmisc             22.14-1               utilities that use the proc file s

initscripts suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information