Freebsd filesystem ( hard reboot )

[Ivan Voras]

Randy Ramsdell wrote:
> We started using FreeBSD for some network monitoring, but have found
> that a hard reboot forces us to answer filesytem questions on boot. Is
> there a way to mount each filesystem without this? Or how can we use
> FreeBSD in a remote location without needing to intervene in
> situatutions like this?

Usually, FreeBSD can boot just fine without user interaction when power
fails or there's some other cause for a "hard" OS failure (e.g. a kernel
panic). That it isn't doing so in your case is significant, because it
may point to serious problems. Firstly, what is the server used for? Do
you have unusually high load on the file system - a busy file server or
a database with lots of writes?

- The default is for the root partition to be mounted "noasync" and
Soft-updates to be used for all other file systems. Both settings can
handle "hard" OS failures pretty good. Did you alter the default
settings when creating the file systems? If you don't know, send the
output of "mount" command.

- How are your drives set up? Are they on a "dumb" disk controller or on
a RAID controller? (which one?) Is the RAID controller perhaps doing
write caching without a battery unit?

- Can you connect the UPS devices with the server machines so they can
shutdown gracefully when the power is about to fail?

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