Emergency! Emergency! There's an emergency going on...

....... it's still going on!

Well, here in sunny Cambridgeshire, we've had the mother of all thunder storms. It started yesterday night (22nd July 2013) at about 23:30, and raged on until approximately 08:30 the next morning. I've never seen a thunder storm last so long, or crack so loudly.

This has caused me two problems. Firstly, I haven't slept a wink, and I get dreadfully grumpy when I don't sleep.  Secondly, this caused a local power outage which meant that half the clocks in the house needed to be reset this morning, including the ruddy microwave, which requires a degree in quantum mechanics to operate.

Anyway! Not only did the outage kill power to my microwave, but also to my server, which from  my previous post you'll know has already had me tearing my hair out.  My server is all set to restart after a power failure, which it dutifully did, but it did not complete the boot process.

I don't have a monitor connected to my server, it's tucked away neatly out of sight and runs VortexBox quite happily, until today.  I "borrowed" the 19" Flat TV from the bedroom and got to work.

I didn't want to see the following message:

Welcome to emergency mode

Oh, what fresh hell is this...!?

Above that not very welcoming message was a series of details relating to a File System Check (fsck). I've never had to enter maintenance mode within Linux before, and I count myself lucky indeed.

I did a little searching and found that one possible cause could be to do with an error in the /etc/fstab file. This rang a bell with me as I had indeed been messing with fstab whilst troubleshooting my Logical Volume issue. I entered my root password to enter Maintenance Mode and set to work.

[vortexbox]# nano /etc/fstab

Sure enough, there was the line I added last week:

 UUID=DC9x1x-OEPu-uLAo-9zyr-nTIU-RmIi-Zjiob5     /root/usbtemp    lvm2     default    0    0

I commented out the line, saved the file and restarted the server.  With fingers crossed and with baited breath, the server restarted fine and was back to normal.

I'm sure there's a moral to this story, but I'm buggered if I know what it is.....