On 6/30/2011 6:49 AM, Daniel Feenberg wrote:
On Wed, 29 Jun 2011, per...@pluto.rain.com wrote:
Steve Polyack <kor...@comcast.net> wrote:
... An occaisional fat-finger in /etc/fstab may cause one to
end up in single-user mode ... some of these systems have a LOM
(lights-out management) controller which shares the system's
on-board NICs ... when the system drops out of init(8) and into
single-user mode, the links on the interfaces never come up,
and therefore the LOM becomes inaccessible.
... all one has to do is run ifconfig to cause the NIC's links to
come up ... why do we have to run ifconfig(8) to bring the links
up on the attached interfaces?
When trying to troubleshoot a problem that was known or suspected to
involve the network or its hardware, one might not _want_ the NICs
Well, maybe, but if the system needs to boot into multi-user mode for
the LOM to be available, what is the need for the LOM? At that point
you can do everything you might need through the OS interface. Can I
ask what is the brand of this so-called LOM? Is there any
documentation implying something more useful? Do they describe doing a
bare metal install of an
OS?
They are the Dell Remote Access Controllers (DRACs). Now, they do have
their own dedicated NIC, which we use for anything that really needs the
attention. However, the shared feature saves us a switchport per server
we use it on. When both on-board NICs are cabled (i.e. for lagg(4)
failover), then the DRAC's shared NIC mode *also* supports automatic
failover between both on-board NICs. This doesn't help however if the
operating system never turns on the links to either on-board NIC.
I was able to "fix" the single-user mode behavior (which I agree, isn't
necessarily broken) and get it to bring up the links by simply patching
init(8) to call system("/sbin/ifconfig") before prompting for the
single-user shell. It works, but I feel dirty.
- Steve
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