Boot Failure and _netdev
Recently at work a backup server decided to reboot itself four times within a 24 hour period. The server has behaved since. I don’t know the root cause of the reboots.
To complicate the incident, in the server /etc/fstab is a standard mount point to a partition with an xfs file system. For some reason the system failed to mount on boot and dumped itself to run level 1. Visiting the system locally revealed the cause of the boot failure.
The recent self reboots are new, but this was not the first time I had seen this specific boot failure on this system.
While the root cause of the self reboots are unknown I needed a way to avoid the boot failure.
I added the _netdev boot option to the fstab. The option delays mounting until a network connection is established. The option is intended for remote block devices using iSCSI. While the backup server mount point is not remote and does not depend on a network connection, the mount option works the same for local mounts and avoids the boot failure.
The system runs CentOS. Somehow I am not surprised.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: CentOS, General
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