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Re: Unfriendly 'Mounting remote filesystems' problems



You (Bill Bumgarner) wrote:
> It seems that If one screws up /etc/fstab in any way-- or if one screws up  
> the network support in any way and makes the mistake of rebooting the  
> machine, it comes up to 'mounting remote filesystems' and, effectively,  
> locks up.

With the latest sysvinit, you can just press Control-C to interrupt and
the bootup will continue. This is a feature of sysvinit-2.65 which I haven't
released yet though, but I will very soon.

> 1) Is there a single-user boot?  Ie; under NEXTSTEP, if I specify '-s' to  
> the booter, it [if enabled] will boot the machine into a single-user mode  
> without initializing any of the network stuff or mounting any filesystems.

Yes, _but_ /etc/init.d/boot will be executed first to initialize the system.

You can however give the "-b" (or "emergency") flag on the LILO command
line, and then init will spawn a shell for you before _anything_ else.

This behaviour is the same as that of SunOS 4.1

> 2) Could Ctrl-C or some other magic key be enabled such that, if the  
> machine locks up at a particular step during the boot, one could effectively  
> cancel the initialization of that piece?

Yes. See above.

> Obviously, both options come with security implications.  Though-- in both  
> cases, as long as it leads to a login prompt, the 'implications' should not  
> be any worse than a normal boot?

No, someone with access to the physical console can also press CTRL-ALT-DEL,
or turn the machine off, or damage it with an axe or whatever.

> I'm a bit frustrated-- this is the THIRD time I have had to boot using the  
> boot/root disks to fix a problem...

You should have known about the "-b" flag ;)

> Damn, I really, really wish we had a  
> GPL'd implementation of Netinfo for Linux [or ANY implementation of  
> Netinfo].

Netinfo?

Mike.
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