When is BuildWorld necessary?

[Bob]

On Saturday 16 September 2006 15:52, pobox at verysmall.org wrote:

>
> But I have one question - do you rebuild the world on a remote machine
> (without physical access) and if yes - how do you restart in single user
> mode. This is what I can't understand so far.

I remembered something right after I sent the last post.

 I have done this before, years ago. Not with bsd, but with Linux. I was 
working on a small server farm, and cross-connected serial ports from one 
server to another. Made the serial port the console, and then I could telnet 
to the adjacent server, tip to the other one, and have the system console.

 From there you could pretty safely do whatever you wanted to do, if the 
kernel were to fail to boot, you would be left at the loader prompt, where 
you could boot the box into a known good kernel.
 
I can't see why you couldn't do something like that with FreeBsd. All you need 
is a serial port you can control remotely, like an adjacent server, or a 
router.... set it all up beforehand, and you should be good to go.
 
Bob