On Wed, 31 Aug 2016, Steve Blinkhorn wrote: > It took three days for an engineer with sufficiently developed skills to > become available: He solved the problem by switching the server on.
Having found no good way to truly address issues like this without some control of my own, I don't deal with an ISP that won't give me power control and console. HP ILO's are a good solution since they can be used for both a hard power cycle and give you a real remote console. If your console stays in text mode, you don't even have to license the iLO. Many server BIOSs' have a mode whereby they can provide console support via a dedicated serial port (Tyan comes to mind as one of these). If you combine that functionality with something than can do remote power control (like a Baytech RPC or APC network PDUs) then you've got the same features. > But this led me to wonder how I would cope if, for instance, a server > came up in single-user mode requiring an fsck. If you have true console access it wouldn't matter. You'd do the fsck then keep truckin'. > I can see from the man pages for shutdown(8) and fastboot(8) that there > is provision related to this kind of circumstance. I'll just apologize because I doubt my response was what you were looking for. I'll simply say this, when it comes to hosted systems, the faster the system can bring up the network and ssh with the absolute minimum of dependencies, the better. AFAIK, I've never seen an OS that really "gets" this, as evidenced that even though OS's *could* use their ramdisk/miniroots to launch OpenSSH (and statically link it), they rarely do (and there are some reasons, but I usually disagree with their importance). For a server without a decent console, having Openssh started is a defacto the same thing as having a usable server, thus the strategy should place a categorically *premium value* on doing that as soon in the boot process as possible with the least number of dependencies. Also, NetBSD has the ability to redirect the console to a serial port as soon as the kernel starts booting. However, you'd need a serial console in place first before you can take advantage of that. However, in your scenario of the system needing an fsck and stopping the boot process, it'd save you from having to call some data-center hands & eyes at your ISP. -Swift