Strange Portage Issue

hawkdernacht · n00b Joined: 12 May 2006 Posts: 7

Ok, I had just finished setting up a brand new Gentoo OS on a new hard drive under a chroot enviornment off of my old install. I was planning restarting into the new OS shortly, but I was going to restart MySQL on my current production install but did it in the wrong ssh window.

This caused all of the dependent scripts for /etc/init.d/mysqld to run. As a result my /var/lib/portage/world file is missing, and now when I try an emerge world -upv I see everything trying to build new (N). All of the packages are actually installed in the system, but portage knows nothing about them. Is there anything I can do?.

Thanks in advance for any help

Ryan

TheRAt · Veteran Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 1580

hawkdernacht · n00b Joined: 12 May 2006 Posts: 7

Unfortunatly, all this did was give me an empy world file. Previously it was missing.

Ryan

TheRAt · Veteran Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 1580

I guess that means U have no portage log file.
You might want to check if there is a script that assists you at the Gentoo Script Repository
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hawkdernacht · n00b Joined: 12 May 2006 Posts: 7

There does not appear to be any scripts created to help compile a world file from the packages I have installed.

TheRAt · Veteran Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 1580

as i understand it, the world file is just a listing of installed apps in the form <category>/<app>
you could extract that from an emerge -p world > world
then editing the resulting file..
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hawkdernacht · n00b Joined: 12 May 2006 Posts: 7

Would that really work to solve my particualr issue? what about any dependencies?

BitJam · Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 4:40 pm Post subject: Re: Strange Portage Issue

hawkdernacht · n00b Joined: 12 May 2006 Posts: 7

Well no worries about making me feel dumb. I'm just confused about what is going on. I have used Gentoo for a number of years not but have not had the time to dive head first into the nitty-gritty. I know how to set it up and get it working, even have it a few production servers but have never seen this happen.

Back to the situation at hand. The only command I ran other than emerging what I needed and tightening security according to the Security Guide, is /etc/init.d/mysql restart. I really didnt think it would have raised the heck it has either, but since i was in a chroot environment, i'm guessing some of the initialization scripts did something funny.

The really bad news is there is no /var/db directory at all in my new install. I have no problem re-emerging eveything, but obviously I'd rather not if possible. This is a production machine and if I don't have to spend hrs of CPU time recompiling everyting I'd rather not. Any help at all is appreciated.

BitJam · Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 5:31 pm Post subject:

Do you have /var on a separate partition? If so, this could be masking your /var/db directory either because the mounted /var is hiding /var/db which is "underneath" it, or because /var/db was created on the mounted /var but it is no longer mounted.

You might want to carefully retrace your steps and see if anything you did could have caused an error like the wild guess above. If you can't find your missing /var/db, I think you will have to re-emerge in order to recreate it.

You might want to change the subject of your top post to "Missing /var/db :-(

" so it might better catch someone's eye who may be able to help you with this specific problem.

hawkdernacht · n00b Joined: 12 May 2006 Posts: 7

Well here's the rub. When i ran the mysql restart command it re-ran all of my init scripts including my fstab, which in the new OS I have set up differantly than in the current OS (differant physical drives) so the mount points were off.

I am checking on any damage that might been done to either system before I chroot back into it and try an emerge.

Color me embarassed. Oh well you live and learn.

I will send an updated on this later, thanks for all of the help.

Ryan

hawkdernacht · n00b Joined: 12 May 2006 Posts: 7

Ok all, I fixed my mounting issue, and luckily the new mount points did not screw anything up. My new system is up and running and all is well. Thanks to everyone who tried to help me out. It is much appreciated.

BitJam · Posted: Mon May 15, 2006 8:14 pm Post subject:

I have a vague memory of running an init.d script while in the chroot and all hell breaking loose. There should probably be a BIG WARNING about this somewhere.

I think that memory helped me help you with your problem. I think it may have been difficult for other people to fully grasp the nature of the problem (even though you described it well) because they hadn't experienced it and were basing their thoughts on their experiences of running init.d scripts in an already fully functioning system.