Re: Small tip proposal for headless systems boot resiliency

[Hubert Feyrer <hubert%feyrer.de@localhost>]

On Tue, 31 Dec 2013, Robert Elz wrote:
> My basic strategy would be to enhance fstab in some yet to be determined way
> to indicate which filesystems were optional, them simply ignore (without
> mounting obviously) any optional filesystem that has a problem (or whose
> parent filesystem could not be mounted) and only abort the boot if a
> non-optional filesystem failed to check & mount.   Since in my case my
> non-optional filesystems are (in practice) all remarkably stable (as in
> nothing much important normally changes on them - the only significant
> changes are the newsyslog updates, and for me, they don't often do anything,
> so they are unlikely to have fsck problems) this would allow the system to
> get up and running in situations where now it stops and waits for
> attention.

from /etc/defaults/rc.conf:

        # Filesystems to mount early in boot-up.
        # Note that `/var' is needed in $critical_filesystems_local (or
        # implied as part of `/') as certain services that need /var (such as
        # dhclient) may be needed to get the network operational enough to mount
        # the $critical_filesystems_remote.  Prepending "OPTIONAL:"  means it
        # will not be an error if that file system is not present in fstab(5).
        #
        critical_filesystems_local="OPTIONAL:/var"
        critical_filesystems_remote="OPTIONAL:/usr"

Maybe that can serve as starting point...


 - Hubert