[rhelv6-list] Dell servers stopping at GRUB if no manual input

Ben bda20 at cam.ac.uk
Tue Jun 18 11:48:01 UTC 2013


On Tue, 18 Jun 2013, Matthias Saou wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:00:52 +0100 (BST)
> Ben <bda20 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> I have a few Dell servers of varying marques: R710, R420, etc.  I've 
>> installed RHEL6 (64bit) on them via DRAC/serial console.  The grub.conf 
>> looks like this:
>>
>> [blah]
>>
>> Whenever I reboot them and I'm not connected to the serial console (or 
>> have a keyboard and monitor plugged in) and don't press <space> and/or 
>> <return> at the point at which it says "Press any key to continue." to 
>> get the GRUB boot menu up, the servers don't boot. They just appear to 
>> stop at some point and are non-responsive via any method (connecting to 
>> the DRAC/serial console, or plugging in a keyboard and mouse) until 
>> rebooted.
>>
>> Any ideas why, please?  This didn't used to happen with RHEL5, I don't 
>> think.
>
> You might want to check the "Redirection after boot" setting for the
> serial configuration in the BIOS. Typically, since you've set up a
> proper serial console at the GRUB level (and hopefully after too), then
> it should be "Disabled".

That's a very good point.  I checked, and they're set to "Enabled".  So, 
good catch.  Normally I do change that to "Disabled", but seem to have 
missed it on recent builds.  However, someone on Freenode/#rhel suggested 
adding the "--silent" option to the terminal line in GRUB.  This appears to 
have fixed my issue, too, without changing the BIOS option above.  However, 
it does stop the "Hit any key to continue." messages.  This isn't a problem 
for me, but might be for others.


> If that's not the issue, then I don't know what could be, and haven't seen 
> that issue with RHEL6 on similar hardware.

It was the serial redirection after boot thing.  However, I'm going to leave 
the BIOSes alone on those servers that were exhibiting this behaviour and go 
with the "--silent" option, as that won't require a reboot.

Thanks for the help!

Ben
-- 
Unix Support, MISD, University of Cambridge, England




More information about the rhelv6-list mailing list