system hangs on boot up if no internet available

[Kevin Kinsey]

Dave Abouav wrote:
> Our DNS goes through our ISP. The IP addresses of their DNS servers are 
> hard-coded into the server's /etc/rc.conf file.  No amount of waiting 
> seems to help. It always just hangs trying to load sshd.
> 
> Chuck Swiger wrote:
>> On Jul 23, 2008, at 2:25 PM, Dave Abouav wrote:
>>> I setup a FreeBSD server (v 6.1) for my company as a simple Samba 
>>> server. It works fine. Except once in awhile our access to the 
>>> outside internet goes out (due to our ISP), and when it does the 
>>> FreeBSD server gets hung up, even after rebooted. This happened this 
>>> morning, so I put a console on it, and rebooted it. I saw that it 
>>> gets hung trying to start sshd. No error messages are given. If I hit 
>>> Control-C, to skip loading sshd, then the rest of the boot-up goes 
>>> normally and people can again access the server. Any ideas how I can 
>>> avoid this problem? I'd rather not skip the loading of sshd. I don't 
>>> have any special programs on the server that contact the outside world.
>>
>> It's probably doing something which needs a DNS lookup.  Do you have a 
>> subnet-local nameserver available, or does simply waiting for 2 
>> minutes or so for a timeout do the trick?
>>
> 


Workaround, perhaps:  set "UseDNS no" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and try
again?  Perhaps better to run named or something locally, if that helps,
but doing this would at least test Chuck's theory (which seems about
correct to me, though why it *never* goes on I don't know).

Kevin Kinsey