Best way to make a machine boot with or without a Internet connection

[Doug Hardie]

> On 7 August 2020, at 14:08, RW via freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 6 Aug 2020 17:20:16 -0400
> Aryeh Friedman wrote:
> 
>> Due to storm related damage my ISP went out for a few (12) hours
>> earlier in the week and while I got it usable without a Internet
>> connection by putting everything in my LAN in /etc/hosts (I also run
>> a local_unbound --> local bind9 on my file server which I have
>> created a zone file for the LAN machines also), but it was very slow
>> in booting due to ntpdate, tomcat and sendmail not being to connect
>> to the Internet for either forward or reverse DNS.   I don't want to
>> turn these services off, but I want to be able to do a normal boot
>> (no long hangs) if the ISP goes down again.  
> 
> 
> What I used to do when I needed to use my computer without a network
> connection is define an OFFLINE flag in rc.conf and then make the
> setting of relevant "enable" flags conditional on that. If there's
> anything you still need to run you could start it separately with
> onestart later in the boot sequence.

Depending on what you need running you may be able to use the proposed fix in bug report 190447.  I use that to move sshd above all the long startup items so that I can access the systems if there is a hang in the boot process.  Generally, SSH access is all I need in those situations.  The other option if you have console access is to control-C through the long running items.  It takes a few of them, and those services are then not initialized or running.  But that gets through the boot process much quicker.

-- Doug