[Cialug] Spontaneous Outbreak of Read-Only-ness

[Daniel A. Ramaley]

Are these physical or virtual machines? On virtual machines this sort of 
thing is semi-normal and indicates something going wrong with the disk 
virtualization (such as not passing data to the guest OS fast enough, so 
the guest thinks the disk is going bad). I've experienced it quite a bit 
with xen virtualization, anyway (both Citrix- and Oracle-flavored xen).

On a physical machine, i'd echo the other suggestions to run fsck on 
your disks. Also, if you do not have a recent backup, make one *today*. 
You may be looking at a failing disk and need to replace it soon. If you 
can replace it before it completely fails, then the process can be 
relatively painless (you can migrate Linux to the new disk rather than 
reinstalling from scratch).

On 2016-02-24 at 11:24:27 Todd Walton wrote:
> I've had two weird read-only-izings happen in the past 24 hours.
> 
> First, a RHEL 6 box: Found I couldn't write files to /tmp, even as
> root. Further poking revealed that I couldn't write to / either. 'cat
> /proc/mounts' said / was rw. Changing SELinux to permissive didn't
> help. Rebooted. All is well.
> 
> Then, a CentOS 6 box: Tried to update root password. It took the
> password twice and then said "passwd: Authentication token
> manipulation error". I tried to mv the shadow file, thinking maybe
> I'd re-shadow passwd, but it wouldn't let me move it because...
> read-only filesystem. Again, 'cat /proc/mounts' showed that that
> should not have been the case. I rebooted and all is now well.
> 
> I can't troubleshoot these further right now because I made the
> problem go away. But anybody seen this before?
> 
> --
> Todd
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__
Daniel A. Ramaley  |  Server Engineer 2
Information Technology Services (ITS) | Drake University

T: +1 515 271-4540
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