Temporarily halt boot process to enter encryption keys?

[RW]

On Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:31:47 -0600
"Corey J. Bukolt" <0.23 at mail.ru> wrote:

> Hello list,
> 
> I have a FreeNAS box with a CF card for root, and 3 drives (soon to be
> 4) set up with encryption and raidz on top of them.
> A less than excellent detailed report of what I did is here:
> http://bit.ly/5BeZq8
> This setup is a bit hackish as after the system boots I need to attach
> each drive using geli, run "zpool import -f primary", and then restart
> all my services (nfs, samba, etc).
> 
> It's become a bit of a chore (especially when doing it all from a
> N810), so I'm looking for a way to temporary halt the boot process so
> that I can ssh in, attach the drives, and then allow the system to
> continue to boot.
> 

It's fairly trivial to write an rc.d script that pauses the boot
process and waits for devices, but sshd runs after LOGIN, and nfs runs
before, so you can't easily reorder then without maintaining modified
rc.d scripts.


I don't see the point though. Why not just write a script to do
what you are doing now?