Linux-kernel mailing list archive 1998-49,: HELP!! "Unable to open initial console"

# HELP!! "Unable to open initial console"

Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@yahoo.com)
Sat, 12 Dec 1998 12:16:33 +1100 (EST)

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I just had the weirdest day. This morning, I recieved reports that my
linux box was acting a little weirdly. It was supposedly not accepting
any connections. I was at school when I heard about it, but I
attempted to verify it (good thing i sit near a computer). So,
basically all the services (telent, smtp, pop, ftp) would disconnect
you in a few miliseconds. The weirdest of all was apache. It said
that all directories were forbidden. It would be understandable if
something had gone wrong with inetd, but apache, which is NOT running
from inetd, expressed similar wackieness. Of course the machine still
repsonded to pings. This led me to believe taht some cracker was
playing a bad prank on me. I called my father and asked him to check
on the poor little box.

I tried connecting again latter. Nothing. The machine was down. Why
would my father have turned off the machine? Or was it the hacker who
decided to rm -rf /?

The moment I got home, I saw on the screen a seemingly normal boot
scroll. It was stopped after the line "VFS: mounted root fs read-only"
with "Unable to open initial console". Same thing happens under 2.0.35
and 2.0.36. I would try a rescue disk but my floppy drive does not
seem to be working.

My questions are:
1) What does that message mean?
2) How can I fix it?
3) How did the daemon wackiness evolve into this? Did I get hacked? It
seems as if the hacker was able to screw up the hardware somehow!!

Thanks A LOT if you can help!!! This machine is my mail server for my
whole family and my hundreds of messages a day from linux-kernel must
all be bouncing, as well as all my mail from anyone else who needs to
reach me.
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