configuring remote headless servers

[steve%prd.co.uk@localhost (Steve Blinkhorn)]

Following on from the recent saga of upgrading from 2.0 to 7.0 which
assiduous readers may recall, the servers were re-installed in their
racks in the data centre.   All was well with one of them but the
other apparently failed.   It took three days for an engineer with
sufficiently developed skills to become available: He solved the
problem by switching the server on.

But this led me to wonder how I would cope if, for instance, a server
came up in single-user mode requiring an fsck.   Once upon a time I
was able to assume that this would be a circumstance familiar to data
centre staff, but no longer.   What I would need would be a boot
sequence that started the network before any file system checking and
allowed remote login.   Alternatively, file system checking could be
disabled by default - even if the system went down by power cycling
the machine.

I can see from the man pages for shutdown(8) and fastboot(8) that
there is provision related to this kind of circumstance.   Would it
simply be a matter of having an empty file named /fastboot in the root
directory?   If it matters, these are i386 machines.

Any gotchas with this approach?

-- 
Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost>