Will Meister wrote:
I maintain several opensolaris fileservers remotely. Occasionally, one will
fail to boot requiring an on-site visit to fix. It's usually something minor,
like a service failing to start following an upgrade or a corrupt boot archive.
For example, editing /etc/system or another config file prior to the system
losing power or crashing will cause the system to fail to boot on restart as it
thinks the boot archive is corrupt. (It is apparently only regenerated during
a successful shutdown/reboot).
Is there a way to either force the system to boot to console even if something is awry, or at least provide SSH access to the recovery console? The servers in question don't have IPMI and I'd prefer to avoid having to get an IPKVM for each one.
Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.
If you want to force a boot archive update manually, use 'bootadm
update-archive' - it might be a good thing to run this right after
making any obvious system boot changes.
By definition, if something is wrong during the boot processes, you
can't provide Operating System-level remote access, as you have no idea
what state the OS could be in. Thus, the only sane default for the OS is
to either come up into failsafe mode (if it can't read the boot archive,
and thus doesn't know what drivers to load) or to single-user
maintenance mode. You need to have hardware console access to fix
anything. For SPARC boxes, this is trivial, as the serial port (A) can
output the console. Some commercial x86 boxes likewise have the
potential to have a serial console - look at your BIOS to see if such a
thing is supported. Cheap serial console->network devices are all around.
Otherwise, you either need hardware that supports IPMI or a a Service
Processor, or get yourself a IPKVM. Frankly, one of the big advantages
of Sun-branded x86 gear is the FREE, very feature-full Service Processor
built into each one. HP gear has this to, but nowhere near as
feature-rich (you pay extra for the nice features). IBM gear also uses
an SP (they call it a BMC - baseboard management controller), and I like
it, though, I'm still partial to Sun's (the http-served Java GUI console
app is just slick).
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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