Question about NIC link state initialization

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Wed, 29 Jun 2011, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:

> Steve Polyack <korvus at 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?

Daniel Feenberg