I have a few servers running FreeBSD at a datacenter far from where I live. They've been running (with the occasional hardware upgrades, and lots of software upgrades) for years, with minimal trouble.
Today, I went to upgrade ports, and realized two of the servers were running 13.2, which reached EOL a couple of weeks ago. I upgraded the first of them to 13.3, with zero problems - freebsd-update upgrade -r 13.3-RELEASE, reboot for the kernel, cleanup, no problem.
The second one, the early stuff went fine. Fetched the new stuff, installed, upgraded to 13.3, merged config files. Rebooted. The machine never came back up.
I logged into the KVM console supplied by the datacenter, so I could watch the bootup. I let it run through... it got to
Dual Console: Serial Primary, Video Secondary
and just hung.
Rebooted, turned on verbose in Boot Options... I get one line farther:
start_init: trying /sbin/init
I've tried booting into Single user mode. I've tried turning on safe mode. I've tried booting into default/kernel_old. Nothing gets me farther than one of these two hang spots.
The data center officially stopped supporting FreeBSD earlier this year. I was okay with that, because I've never really needed them for anything in the decade and a half I've been with them... but it means I have no way of asking them to put together an emergency disk I can boot from on a USB stick or whatever. (All of the googling I've done suggests that this might be fixable if I can edit /boot/loader.conf... but I have no way of doing that, that I know of.)
Do I have ANY options to get this machine running again?
One thing that's super-weird to me: the load screen shows 'Cons: Dual (Serial Primary)' when it's rebooted, but regardless of whether I change it to Video Primary or leave it alone, the hang line reads "Serial Primary'.
Am I totally screwed?
Today, I went to upgrade ports, and realized two of the servers were running 13.2, which reached EOL a couple of weeks ago. I upgraded the first of them to 13.3, with zero problems - freebsd-update upgrade -r 13.3-RELEASE, reboot for the kernel, cleanup, no problem.
The second one, the early stuff went fine. Fetched the new stuff, installed, upgraded to 13.3, merged config files. Rebooted. The machine never came back up.
I logged into the KVM console supplied by the datacenter, so I could watch the bootup. I let it run through... it got to
Dual Console: Serial Primary, Video Secondary
and just hung.
Rebooted, turned on verbose in Boot Options... I get one line farther:
start_init: trying /sbin/init
I've tried booting into Single user mode. I've tried turning on safe mode. I've tried booting into default/kernel_old. Nothing gets me farther than one of these two hang spots.
The data center officially stopped supporting FreeBSD earlier this year. I was okay with that, because I've never really needed them for anything in the decade and a half I've been with them... but it means I have no way of asking them to put together an emergency disk I can boot from on a USB stick or whatever. (All of the googling I've done suggests that this might be fixable if I can edit /boot/loader.conf... but I have no way of doing that, that I know of.)
Do I have ANY options to get this machine running again?
One thing that's super-weird to me: the load screen shows 'Cons: Dual (Serial Primary)' when it's rebooted, but regardless of whether I change it to Video Primary or leave it alone, the hang line reads "Serial Primary'.
Am I totally screwed?