On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 1:53 PM, Will Meister <[email protected]> wrote: > I maintain several opensolaris fileservers remotely. Occasionally, one will > fail to boot requiring an on-site visit to fix. It's usually something > minor, like a service failing to start following an upgrade or a corrupt boot > archive. For example, editing /etc/system or another config file prior to > the system losing power or crashing will cause the system to fail to boot on > restart as it thinks the boot archive is corrupt. (It is apparently only > regenerated during a successful shutdown/reboot). > > Is there a way to either force the system to boot to console even if > something is awry, or at least provide SSH access to the recovery console? > The servers in question don't have IPMI and I'd prefer to avoid having to get > an IPKVM for each one. > > Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.
You could probably configure the systems to use a serial console instead of a KVM console. At that point, you could either use something like a cyclades terminal server (still somewhat costly) or cross-link pairs of servers. This assumes that each server has two serial ports - put the console on serial port 0 and connect it to serial port 1 of its "buddy" server with a null modem cable. You can use tip(1M) or other things that probably aren't included in OpenSolaris to talk to the serial port. But really... you should be working toward buying enterprise class servers that have a built-in system controller so that you don't have to worry about this stuff. If you don't have enterprise class servers, I suspect that you are also missing things like ECC memory and redundant power supplies. You can run a small shop like this for a while, but eventually the reasons to increase the quality of your hardware will reach a tipping point. Something like a slightly bad DIMM can make your life miserable with corrupted data (possibly causing more frequent reboots that don't go well...) and unsympathetic ears on zfs-discuss. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
