2

Because of the recently announced bash environment variable vulnerability, I chose this evening to upgrade my headless server from 13.10 to 14.04 - saucy to trusty.

Upon running sudo shutdown -r now after the upgrade finished, it didn't come back up.

I've just spent several hours finding a graphics card to fit in the server, and dragging a monitor up to it, to find out the following:

  1. the grub menu doesn't appear to have a default timeout (I waited a couple of minutes)
  2. the eys (sp?) service is asking me interactive questions about mounting partitions when it can't find the source drive - "press s to skip mounting or m for manual recovery"

Now, I can solve the first problem easily enough - reconfigure grub with a timeout, I'll be sure to check it manually after my next OS upgrade.

The second problem should go away after I take out the graphics card and plug my HBA back in.

But the very fact that it's asking me a question is problematic. I don't want any interactive questions to be asked on startup. And I don't want OS upgrades to be adding interactive steps to the boot process.

Is there some flag or setting I'm missing that lets Ubuntu, its upgrade machinery and utilities know that my machine is headless, and the user should not be asked interactive questions or presented with menus without timeouts?

3
  • Why can't it find the source drive? I don't think there is any such setting. Under normal circumstances, the server should boot up fine. The only solution would be to fix the errors you are getting that are stopping the boot processes.
    – terdon
    Sep 24, 2014 at 23:15
  • @terdon It can't find the source drive because I disconnected one of the HBA - host bus adapters - in order to insert a graphics card, and I had to insert a graphics card because it wouldn't get past grub. Sep 24, 2014 at 23:33
  • @terdon the point is, any inability to mount any random file system listed in fstab shouldn't halt the boot (for long). Just continue booting - at least until ssh is up. Sep 24, 2014 at 23:35

0

Browse other questions tagged .