On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 04:14:48PM -0400, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
My manager reminds me that "in the old Sun days", the ssh server came up first, *before* the fsck on boot, so that if there was a problem, and fsck
Define "old Sun". SunOS 3 and 4 never had ssh. Solaris 2.x, Solaris 7, Solaris 8 never came with ssh out of box. Solaris 9 was the first version to come with (a broken) SSH as part of the standard build.
was waiting for an answer, you could remotely ssh in, kill it, restart it, and answer (or give it the right flags).
No. You could do it on the console (as others have said) and so with a serial console connected to a terminal server, or with later-day LOM devices, you could get to the console "out of band".
Sun, in fact, were the poster boys for needing to fsck because they threw a lot of stuff onto /usr and had /usr as a separate partition. And many many of the shared libraries were in /usr/lib, so you could only run statically linked programs (normally in /sbin) before filesystems were mounted. SunOS 4 didn't even have "cat" available, so the startup scripts had a shcat() function which used shell builtins to emulate it.