Solved How to rollback a BE when no keyboard access at bootloader

stratacast1

stratacast1

I'm currently running FreeBSD 11.2 on my server and looking to upgrade to 12.0. Normally, I'm good with just creating the BE, doing the upgrade and if poop hits the ceiling fan it's not hard to rollback. However, with my current server I have 0 keyboard input at the bootloader so I have no way to select a BE to rollback.

So, when I upgrade and, say, I can't boot into my new system and cannot access the different boot environments, how could I rollback? Is it possible to hook up my SSD to another box, boot, and set the old pre-upgraded boot environment as default and then put the SSD back in my server? This is my only solution for now until I can get a new piece of hardware later this year
 
Thankfully I didn't have to worry about this! But you're right, I forgot about the LiveCD hehe. Thank you!
 
stratacast1 said:
However, with my current server I have 0 keyboard input at the bootloader so I have no way to select a BE to rollback.
Click to expand...
Check your BIOS settings, specifically USB legacy support. This "translates" a USB keyboard to an old-fashioned PS/2 keyboard. You need this for systems that don't support USB keyboards. During loader(8) the kernel isn't loaded yet so there's no ukbd(4) either.
 
As it is a server i suppose it also has some form of IPMI console access or at least some type of serial console and/or SoL. Especially the latter one is usually my "last resort" before taking a walk to the rack when a host won't come back up from a reboot...
 
It does have a console port and IPMI. Thankfully this isn't a production box but a personal one, but I'd still like to not have things blow up on me and risk my personal install :) I looked in BIOS for the USB legacy support and even tried using a PS2 keyboard on this guy with no luck. The settings are there and I've tried them all so I've just accepted this about my server until I replace it this year. 10 year old hardware
 
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