Xorg dies

[stubing]

i have several Red Hat 5.5 Client machines with Nvidia 3800 quatro cards. A weird thing is happening on two of the systems.

When the system starts, the xserver tries over and over to start. When I tail the Xorg.log I get

II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Keyboard0" (type: KEYBOARD)
(II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Mouse0" (type: MOUSE)
(--) Mouse0: PnP-detected protocol: "ExplorerPS/2"
(II) Mouse0: ps2EnableDataReporting: succeeded
Could not init font path element unix/:7100, removing from list!


So this is because xfs is dead. I try to restart it but for some reason it dies right away. I changed the xfs configuration file to send the log info to a certain file, but that file is empty.

Has anyone seen this or knows how to debug xfs dieing? The other machines have identical /etc/X11 files and they are working fine.

[Rubberman]

Well, the problem is with the bad/missing file system, not xorg. You are seeing the problem with xorg because files it needs are on the xfs file system. You need to fix that and possibly reinstall xorg if you cannot restore the missing files. As for debugging xfs, if you try to mount it manually, you should see some sort of error from the mount command. Also, you might run "fdisk -l /dev/xfsid" where "xfsid" is the device name of the disc where xfs is located. If the disc is bad, you should see some sort of error(s). Finally, if the drive is accessible, and the errors from mount indicate some sort of file system problem, then you should run xfs_check and xfs_repair on that file system when it is unmounted in order to fix it.

[stubing]

not xfs the file system but xfs the font server that Xorg gets its font paths from.

[whych]

The xorg errors are logged in /var/log/xorgerror.log (maybe not the right name but you should find it). Have a look at this for cluse as to why there is a problem.
You may find there is a problem with the /etc/X11/xorg.conf setup.
I thing RH5.5 allows you to setup x from the command line, so change to run level 3 and setup the x server. (sorry if it's a bit vague, but only started using Fedora/RH6 recently and they all use the new xorg software that doesn't give a setup for xorg.conf)

[stubing]

yes, I have checked the Xorg.log and that is where I am getting the message "Could not init font path element unix/:7100, removing from list!" This is because xfs is dieing. I just can't figure our why xfs is dieing. There is no reference to xfs in any of the system logs. I changed /etc/X11/fs/config to point to a new log file at /tmp/xfs.error.log. When it dies it makes this file but it is empty.

if I run, service xfs stop [failed]
service xfs restart [failed] [ok]
service xfs status xfs is dead but pid file exist

I delete the pid and restart but I get the same results. I have verified all the rpms, and there are no corrupt files. If I could figure out why xfs is dieing, I think I would be good again.

[stubing]

I have also moved the /etc/X11/xorg.conf from a good machine with an identical configuration and the Xserver still cannot start.

[Rubberman]

What about copying the xfs server from a good machine? Have you tried that. If it still fails, then perhaps one of the libraries got munged. Anyway, sorry about the "xfs vs xfs" confusion! To danged many TLAs around causing collision with ones that mean something entirely different. As someone wise once said, "There otter be a law against that!"...

[stubing]

I have verified the rpm packages and I did copy /usr/bin/xfs over from a good machine. Still no luck. Np, I spent a while wondering why an xfs services was even running when I wasn't using the file system

[whych]

Have another look at the error log. Somewhere it should give a clue which video drivers it has tried (failures included). One of these, hopefully, should be that it has loaded the video driver for your card.

From my brief encounter with Centos 5 (wouldn't recognise my network card) I seem to remember that there is a setup script for your video. Boot to runlevel 3 and run this to set up the video.