Re: configuring remote headless servers

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On 31 August 2016 at 11:34, Steve Blinkhorn <steve%prd.co.uk@localhost> wrote:
> 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?

As a data point - I had a USB key set to boot up with dhcpcd and then
run openvpn and sshd, then set the server to boot from USB first.

In the event of a server issue the remote hands had to plug the USB
key and hit the power switch (the OpenVPN was in case someone had
managed to bork the firewall as well such that inbound ssh was
disallowed - don't ask) .

It was generic enough that they could plug it into most any box with
ethernet and have an expectation of it working :)