Re: autoboot ?


Subject: Re: autoboot ?
From: Jag (agrajag@linuxpower.org)
Date: Wed Sep 20 2000 - 17:18:44 MDT


On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, Vanja Bucic wrote:

>
> hi.
> Security is important, I know, but I have an application for a linux box
> that requires no security - it will be contained in a aluminum box and will
> be flying at 130 000 feet. No people around :-)
> But it needs to be insensitive to sudden power failures. It needs to reboot
> and continue running the data aquisition applications no matter what
> happens.
> It is unclear to me how to set up a linux box to boot without user
> interaction.
> Is there a sensible way of doing that, or will I have to change to a
> different OS?

Linux is probablly your best bet, but there are a few things you'd want
to be sure of. The first is that your hardware/bootloader can get linux
booted automatically under linux. I'm not very familiar with OF, but I
know most x86 boxes can do that, including auto-booting with just power
being restored (ie not having to press power button). If you have
sudden power failures, you also want a journaling filesystem. This will
keep you from having to do fsck's on boot which require manual
interaction. The only journaling filesystem I've used is the ext3
patch, but it worked quite well in my circumstances. However, I have
heard of it having problems when being tortured, ie being used in
repeated High-Avaliability fail over demos.

Jag




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