Racker Hacker

Here’s a pretty weird kernel panic that I came across the other day:

Enforcing mode requested but no policy loaded. Halting now.
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

This usually means that you’ve set SELINUX in enforcing mode within /etc/sysconfig/selinux or /etc/selinux/selinux.conf but you don’t have the appropriate SELINUX packages installed. To fix the issue, boot the server into the Red Hat rescue environment and disable SELINUX until you can install the proper packages that contain the SELINUX targeted configuration.

This kernel panic appeared on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 5 server.

Operating System:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

What happened:
The kernel was upgraded and these messages appeared upon reboot.

Work done:
The modules for the RAID card had to be re-compiled and installed for the new kernel.

End result:
Once the drivers were installed, the server came up just fine after a reboot.

Operating System:
FreeBSD 5.4

What happened:
Server went unresponsive at the console and came up with the error upon power cycling.

Work done:
Ran a fsck from single user mode and then rebooted.

End result:
The fsck was successful and the server rebooted without an issue.

Operating System:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1

What happened:
The server was powered down gracefully, moved to a new rack, and then powered on.

Work done:
Ran a fsck from the rescue environment and it eventually completed, but the server would not boot properly.

End result:
The hard drive was in the process of failing, so it was replaced and the operating system was installed onto the new disk. The old disk was stable enough to be mounted read-only, and much of the data was salvaged.