Environment
Novell NetWare 5.1
Novell NetWare 6.0
Novell NetWare 6.5
Situation
During boot, the server indefinitely hangs very early in the
boot process, shortly after mounting the SYS volume. The
server responds to the keyboard, so screens can be switched.
The server also, very occasionally, shows minor disk
activity.
When starting the server using the loadstages, it would hang
immediately after "loadstage 2" is entered, without any further
output.
After executing the NLMs that are loaded in state 2 manually,
it was found that the hang occurs when ws2_32.nlm gets
loaded. WS2_32.NLM will never finish to load, while the
server shows a few seconds of heavy disk activity, and then
stalls.
Resolution
This is due to a corrupt, or excessively large
sys:\etc\resolv.cfg file. When WS2_32.NLM loads it, among
others, reads in the server's DNS configuration from
sys:\etc\resolv.cfg. In this case, the file was over 200MB in
size, and repeated the same line over and over. Trying to
process the 200MB file stalled the loading of WS2_32.NLM and
stopped the server from further booting.
To correct this, delete or rename the sys:\etc\resolv.cfg and
replace it with a proper version.
To be able to delete the offending file, the server needs to
be brought up with
- server -ns -na
- startup
- loadstage 1
At this point, on NetWare 5.1 or 6.0 servers, one can load"toolbox.nlm /NL" from a floppy, or on a NetWare 6.5 server, load
TBX and use that to either delete or rename the sys:\etc\resolv.cfg
file.
Note: Don't forget to recreate a proper resolv.cfg file
after the next reboot