On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 05:41:20PM +0000, Richard A Downing FBCS wrote:
> I have made progress and now run a standard shell in the recovery
> situation, modelling my script on the openbsd example.  I would have
> liked to use sulogin, which is more secure, but as I was planning not
> to install sysVinit, and sulogin is part of that package, it's out for
> the moment, but see below.

Yes, you're right, sulogin is part of sysvinit.

> I'm beginning to think that I'm going to have to install SysVinit
> after all.  (I may need wall, halt, poweroff, reboot, shutdown, and
> sulogin, these are all part of sysVinit)

I still have the sysvinit package on my systems, and use some of its
tools.  It's very difficult to remove the 'essential' package sysvinit
from a Debian system, even if runit is used as init scheme, because
other essential packages depend on sysvinit directly (e.g. dpkg).

A halt and reboot program actually is very simple; but beware, it simply
reboots or halts the kernel and doesn't care about the system's state.
If you use it from stage 1, you should exactly know the system's state
as /etc/runit/1 is the first and only process started since process no 1.

I attach a sample 'reboot.c' source file.  Put it into
/package/admin/runit/compile/, change to this directory, add this to
the Makefile, and run make reboot:
 # cat >>Makefile <<EOT
 reboot: load reboot.o unix.a byte.a
      ./load reboot unix.a byte.a -static
 reboot.o: compile reboot.c reboot_system.h
      ./compile reboot.c
 EOT
 # make reboot

This gives you a reboot program, and with a minor change a halt program.

Regards, Gerrit.