On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, "Bastiaan Welmers" <haasje@welmers.net> wrote:
>
> I need to make a netbsd 1.6.1 box ready for an envirionment without
> people arround. There's only an network connection with telnet, no
> keyboard or whatever. So I need to prepare the box to ensure it will
> always stand by. (except hardware errors of course). I'm about to make a
> hardware watchdog to reset the box if the OS would hang for whatever
> reason. 
>  
> One thing is that I already got problems with coming back after a
> temporary power supply fail. Before mounting the partitions fsck found a
> partition inconsistent and falls back into a single-user mode without
> telnet or network connection. Something I absolutely don't want to
> happen. Is there a way to ensure the system won't stop booting because
> of this kind of problems?  

Sooner or later, you're going to need remote access to the console, if for
no other reason than that single user mode is useful for all sorts of
things.  

Suppose, for example, you update your rc.conf, change your network
settings, whatever, and reboot.  You can cross your fingers from 300 km
away and hope everything works, so you can ssh in again.  And if it
doesn't, what then?  

You can set up NetBSD to use a serial port for a remote console.  That
won't get you access to an i386's BIOS, but it will let you manage NetBSD.
 You can hook the serial port up to a modem, or to a terminal server (and
hook that up to your Ethernet).  

--jkl