[CentOS] ssh in while in fsck

Wed Apr 27 22:30:04 UTC 2011
Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org>

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 04:14:48PM -0400, m.roth at 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.

-- 

rgds
Stephen