auto boot into single mode

[Marten Vijn]

On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 16:46 +0700, K Anh, Hunh wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I have a pfSense router. pfSense is based on FreeBSD.
> 
> Because of low cost design, I haven't any fail-over router. Hence I often follow these steps:
> 
> * boot the router normally
> * electric cut
> * physically access the router
> * boot the router in single mode
> * run $fsck -y /dev/ad8s1a (automatically fix all errors)
> * reboot the router in normal mode
> * enjoy the next electric cut

For crusial systems I put a box on top of it with USB (running NanoBSD
or TinyBSD).

USB gives my access to:
- serial
- power (Gembird Silver line) 
  - http://sispmctl.sourceforge.net/
  - http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=132786
 
You also may consider to rebuild your firewall in nanobsd, you don't
have a gui, but will have of lot more freedom. 


cheers,
Marten


> 
> (Because the router has a very hard work it cannot suffer anything wrong on the harddisk.)
> 
> I also have to do the same steps for my laptop.
> 
> My question is that whether we can setup FreeBSD so that it can automatically boot into single mode if there's something wrong in hard disk, *OR* at least it will execute fsck automatically/successfully?
> 
> (I often see that after such type of error, FreeBSD cannot fix the hard disk in normal mode. This is quite far from Linux; I rarely boot my Linux machines single mode after electric cut)
> 
> Thank you for you helps,
> 
> Regards,
> 
-- 
Marten Vijn
linux 2.0.18 OpenBSD 3.6 FreeBSD 4.6
http://martenvijn.nl
http://opencommunitycamp.org
http://wifisoft.org