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October 11, 2004

"auto-boot? false" prevents Solaris machines from starting up

Duh, it's obvious. Still, I need to remind to myself before restarting our Solaris servers to verify that the auto-boot? is set to true.

The Tufts University data center did some major electrical work yesterday, requiring a shutdown of our farm of servers for a 12-hour period. In theory, when the power was back on and machines started up everything should come back when the machines start up (database, webservers, cvs etc). Unfortunately all except one of the machines stopped after the hardware check at the ok> prompt.

On further inspection, all of the machines had auto-boot? set to false, which means that after the hardware check the machine drops into the boot prom. I'd guess they were set to that when going through the multiple restarts during the build process and never got changed. At the ok (boot prom) prompt:

setenv auto-boot? true
does the trick and we're back in business.

Posted by mike at October 11, 2004 6:45 AM

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Comments

We actually check to see that this is set to false for our servers. We've had times were it was set to true and then the server has a kernel panic and reboots. Instead of dropping it out into an OK prompt and us getting notified that it's down. It just reboots to happen again at a later date. We'd rather know about the problems than have stuff start up automatically.

Posted by: Matt Millard at October 14, 2004 11:33 PM