On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 12:12 AM, Scott Kitterman <[email protected]> wrote: > There was a lot of discussion around improving the server boot experience > before the UDS-M. A number of people expressed interest in seeing more useful > diagnostic information during boot. Others expressed concerns with boot > reliability on the more complex hardware typically found in servers. > > How are we doing on this? Personally, I can't remember the last time I > rebooted a server and it wasn't via SSH and the hardware I use is the sort > there were problems with. Are these still issues for the Ubuntu Server > community? > > Scott K >
Our servers are still either Lucid or Hardy, so forgive me if this has been addressed in Meerkat. An issue we ran into when moving servers to Lucid was the new (to me at least) nobootwait flag for fstab. This bit us because we were migrating our "data" partition from one RAID array to another. We thought we had everything setup correctly, rebooted for one reason or another, and the server would not come up. The bad thing is that our server was in a colo facility, not in our office (like I'm sure a lot of them are). Long story short, we had fat fingered the fstab entry for our data partition that we mount at /var/data. The server was just sitting there waiting for someone to hook up a monitor and press the s key so it would skip trying to mount /var/data, and would boot the system so we could fix it. In the end, we just paid our colo's "remote hands" fee and had them do it, but it was annoying to have to pay them a fee just to push the s key so we could fix our system. Are there any plans/ideas to prevent that from happening? We have since been sure to add the nobootwait option to our non-os related partitions for safe keeping in the future, and I am sure it was probably mentioned in the release notes somewhere, but it seems kind of backwards to keep a commonly headless machine like a server from booting, when it can, just because another (perhaps non essential) partition isn't setup correctly. In the past, it would have booted up and just not mounted the data partition. Thanks, Preston -- ubuntu-server mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
