Hi all,
I was wondering how to increase the robustness of the booting process,
so that a box would be able to keep itself on its feet without
intervention of the console. I think this would be of great value to the
many people who administer colocated boxes.
I'm not much of a coder so all I can do is mailing this (at the risk of
wasting your time with total useless crap ofcourse, in which case I
apologize.)
1. Old kernel recovery
When 'make install'ing a new kernel, a flag is raised (say,
'revert_on_fail') which is only cleared after a successful system
initialisation. When the new kernel boots, a panic in this state or
an unexpected reboot (reset after a system hang) would cause
/kernel.old to be loaded on the next boot instead (maybe the same
could work for /etc/rc.conf.old)
2. Automatic file system checks
In case of a powercycle or crash, it could be that a filesystem needs
fixing. Now I don't know much about fs internals, but I guess that in
most cases just answering 'Y' to fsck's questions will fix things. I
would appreciate an option where an inconsistency would start up fsck
in an "automatic" repair mode, with all actions logged and "undo"
data being saved (in case manual review is needed).
There!
(Merry etc etc, by the way!)
walter
--
Walter W. Hop [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +31 6 24290808 | PGP key: 0xD4DD8DEB
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