I have a very old Sparc Solaris network that was working fine last week, but after a power outage none of the workstations will boot.
The network looks like this:
host A: solaris 2.6, shares /export/home to network by NFS
host B: solaris 8, runs NIS server. Mounts /export/home/ by NFS.
host C: RHEL5, shares /share to network by NFS. Mounts /export/home/ by NFS.
I figured that the main problem was host A, since you need the home directories available for the other workstations to boot(?). Host A does not mount anything by NFS as far as I know. However, this workstation will NOT boot. The OBP bootup sequence looks like this:
Boot device <blah>
configuring network interface le0
Hostname <hostname>
check file system <everything ok>
check ufs filesystem <everything ok>
NIS domainname is <name>
starting router discovery
starting rpc services: rpcbind keyserv ypbind done
setting default interface for multicast: add net 224.0.0.0: gateway <hostname>
<HANGS at this point>
Is there some kind of debug mode so that I can get more detail as to why the workstation won't boot? Is my network structure inherently susceptible to power outage? Is there a way I can boot up to command line so I can at least turn off the NFS mounting?
Best Answer
This problem was due to a failure of a foreground NFS volume to mount, due to the NFS volume being unavailable. To fix this I booted into single user mode (Thanks lain!) and modified vfstab so that it would not try to mount the volumes. Then I continued boot and everything came up fine. In the future I will use option bg (for baground mount) in vfstab, since the default is foreground which can cause boot problems.