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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?

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  • There is a way to boot Solaris in verbose mode. And if the text scrolls by to quickly you can use Ctrl+S to pause it and Ctrl+Q to let it keep going. Feb 21, 2011 at 14:37
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    At the OK prompt boot -s will allow you to boot to single user mode which may get you in, boot -a is interactive mode which may help you find out what's hanging.
    – user9517
    Feb 21, 2011 at 14:37
  • How do I boot into verbose mode? boot -v???
    – joshxdr
    Feb 21, 2011 at 14:41
  • Ok, I booted with boot -v, unfortunately the last line of bootup text is the same: setting default interface for multicast: add net 224.0.0.0: gateway <hostname>
    – joshxdr
    Feb 21, 2011 at 14:44
  • I tried boot -a, but the last line of bootup text is the same: setting default interface for multicast: add net 224.0.0.0: gateway <hostname>
    – joshxdr
    Feb 21, 2011 at 14:51

1 Answer 1

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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.

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    You previously wrote "Host A does not mount anything by NFS as far as I know." So was that a false assumption ?
    – jlliagre
    Feb 21, 2011 at 15:29

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