[PLUG] X font server cause boot hang

[Rich Shepard]

  Has anyone seen a situation where the presence of xfs and/or xfstt causes
the boot process to hang when trying to load these daemons?

  While it's not happened before today, it certainly became a major PITA all
of a sudden. (I was rebooting because I built the 2.4.19 kernel and tried to
boot with it as a test. Something's wronng with the installation of that
kernel, and it was when trying to boot with the old, 2.2.19 kernel, that it
started to hang.)

  Here's another wierd thing. During the POST check before booting, the
system reports that the floppy drive test fails. I press the F1 key to go on
and the floppy drive is perfectly usable. So, I've not thought too mauch
about it, especially as I don't reboot too often.

  Today, I commented out the nfs-mounted filesystems in /etc/fstab, and now
the floppy disk failure error does not appear during a boot! I have the X
font server problems, however, just to keep me on my toes.

  FWIW, trying to upgrade the other workstation (caddis, to those of you who
know of my network) to RH 7.3 kept failing when the upgrade program tried to
install 'chkconfig'. This happened twice, on two different medium brands,
but with the ISO from the same mirror source. Using yet another disk 1, from
a different ISO source, I specified to NOT upgrade 'chkconfig' and the
process ran to completion.

  But, packages I specifically excluded from upgrade -- the KDE and Gnome
packages -- were installed anyway! This is the most troublesome upgrade in
five years. I have expert consultation here, but it's an ongoing challenge.

Sigh,

Rich