interactive stop on boot

[John Nielsen]

On Friday 14 March 2008 11:24:57 am Jason Barnes wrote:
> Hi -- I'm running a "Tombstone" machine that's functioning as a
> server.  The machine is located somewhere with a fast connection, and
> not somewhere that I have easy access to.  As such, I want this
> machine to do its best to boot up and get onto the network, no matter
> what happens on boot, so that I have a chance to actually fix the
> problem.
>
> Lately when it boots it runs into an NFS mounting error, claiming that
> some of my NFS-mounted drives have unexpected inconsistencies.  It
> says "unexpected error - help!" and then quits to a /bin/sh
> single-user-mode prompt.  As I am 10 miles away, this is decidedly
> unhelpful.  I don't care if it can't mount some irrelevant drive or
> not; I want it to boot up and ask me questions later.

You probably want your NFS entries in fstab to have the "noauto" option, 
and you _definitely_ want the last two fields to be zeroes. Even if you 
_do_ want the NFS mounts to come up at boot I would still set them to be 
noauto and then write your own script to try to mount them later.

> Is there a way that I can set the machine to do its best to boot no
> matter what it finds at boot time?  Thanks in advance for any help you
> can provide,

The bootup rc script is just a sh script, you can hack it to do whatever 
you want. That said, it only bails out if there's a (potentially) 
significant problem. Given that this is a remote machine, you should be 
extra-careful when modifying anything to do with the startup process, 
especially fstab or any firewall rules. You could also look at options 
like a serial console, IP KVM, or something like a LightsOut card for 
your system.

JN