[CentOS] unattended fsck on reboot

Wed Jan 6 20:42:32 UTC 2010
Brian Mathis <brian.mathis at gmail.com>

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 3:11 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/6/2010 1:17 PM, Stephen Harris wrote:
>
>>>> On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 12:34 PM, nate<centos at linuxpowered.net>   wrote:
>>>>> No out of band management?
>>
>>>> My thoughts exactly.  All servers should have this these days, be it
>>>> an integrated card or an IP-based KVM.
>>
>>> But, on the other hand they should never need it, except perhaps when
>>> installing the OS if you don't use a full-auto method or clone disks.
>>
>> All hardware sucks, all software sucks.
>>
>> Your machine _will_ go wrong and you _will_ need remote console access and
>> remote power ability.  Especially if you have thousands of these things.
>
> Of course things break - including the extra stuff you might add for out
> of band access, but (a) many/most of the things that break can't be
> fixed remotely so you are going to end needing to swap things out
> anyway, and (b) if you have thousands you should have enough redundancy
> to survive until you get around to swapping the broken thing with
> something that works.  An IP KVM might save a trip or hands-on support
> call once in a while but the odds aren't that great.
>
> --
>   Les Mikesell
>    lesmikesell at gmail.com


Things break, but you hope they don't all break at the same time.  If
the KVM goes down, it's probably not at the same time you need to fsck
a server that you just rebooted.  And when other things break, the
goal is to have enough redundancy on hand to be able to fix the
problem until you can replace whatever broke without dropping
everything at 2am.

Also, depending on your provider, a remote KVM winds up being cheaper
than the cost of a few remote-hands calls.