Saturday, 27 September 2014

Ubuntu stops at Grub menu

I had this annoying issue with my Ubuntu server. Every time it rebooted, quite often because of a power failure, it wouldn't boot properly. I needed to go the storage room where I have it and connect a laptop with a serial cable. Well, I got an UPS to at least stop this from happening inadvertently but I decided to fix the issue once and for all when I need to reboot it for other reasons. And it turns out that since 12.04 LTS there has been a very simple solution. Just adding the following to /etc/default/grub fixes this issue:
GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT=0

The problem is that if the system goes down without proper shutdown, default behaviour is to stop in the Grub menu. This is pretty ridiculous for servers.

As it happens I managed to buy the only UPS (from APC) without remote access, so I can't set the system to shutdown in case of power failure. But the UPS should be able to keep the system running for at least 30 minutes, easily, and our power failures are not that long. Think there has been one that long once and that was because our mains was cut by some workers.

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