OK, so I did what I thought would be a simple process of re-allocating unused disk space after upsizing my linode.

After rebooting, my linode times out via ssh, and didn't give me a login prompt via lish until i applied this fix:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7481

After logging in via lish, /dev/xvda gets mounted read-only, but I'm not sure if that's a symptom or a cause.
Looks to me like no services were started at all, including sshd and up to apache and mysql.

I've checked /etc/fstab, as advised here:
viewtopic.php?t=5522

I've tried working thru the troubleshooting guide
http://library.linode.com/quick-start-troubleshooting

Finally i've disabled /etc/init/plymouth* files, as instructed in
http://library.linode.com/upgrading/upg ... 0.04-lucid

No files in /var/log seem to have been updated at all after the first shutdown and resize, since the fs is read-only, so nothing helpful there.

I'm pretty much flying blind here - I don't know much about sysadmin if you couldn't already tell.
I do have a backup, but from my understanding the upsizing shouldn't have changed anything on my disk, so restoring to a backup is going to put me right back where i am now.
seems like some configuration change in the 75 days since last reboot has borked the boot process.
Any help much appreciated.

After discussing with linode tech support, updating to latest kernel, and fsck'ing again, no progress.

The latest from linode tech support is:


I don't know how restoring from backup will help, since the most recent backup should be an exact duplicate of the existing disk.
I'm also not sure whether anyone has made changes to linode boot scripts, nor how to determine whether that is the case.

The Linode Backup Service will have a copy of your machine from yesterday, a week ago, and about two weeks ago (along with whenever you took a snapshot).

-Chris

If nobody on our staff can figure out how and which boot scripts were modified, i'll have to resort to restoring from backups.
I'll post any updates here.