How to delay FN boot in a state where it's safe to power down?

[Kei]

Hello,
Due to a bug on my supermicro where it's very frequent to have the server rebooting instead of correctly powering down, I cannot use my UPS to safely turning the server down. This is a known bug that seemingly cannot be solved anytime soon, so I'd need a workaround.
So I thought I could I do to delay the FN boot so there will be no time for the server to load any data from the boot disk that might get corrupted, by adding some kind of "grub" or other mechanism that will wait a couple of minutes. In this case, that will be the scenario:
UPS issues shutdown -p now upon battery low (2 minutes before UPS shutdown); the FN server incorrectly reboots but gets stuck doing nothing in a state where it must wait for some time to pass. After two minutes the power fails, but no data can be corrupted on the FN boot pool. Any thought about this?

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[jgreco]

Maybe jack up autoboot_delay from 2 to some large number like 300 (5 minutes)?

But you'd probably be better off resolving your issue. If you're shutting down the system, why not "halt" instead of "halt -p"? That way it'll stop at the "Please press any key to reboot" prompt.

 

[Kei]

Than you for your reply jgreco. I've also tryed shutdown -h if that's what you were saying, but it doesn't work. This is very weird, I know. There's a thread on this problem and many people are affected, even after BIOS and FN upgrades, and only supermicro boards: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/shutdown-doesnt.27752/page-4#post-301239

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[jgreco]

Try "halt". If your machine isn't halting, that's a substantial issue, of much more concern than some ACPI-isn't-working-right-and-won't-power-off thing.

 

[Kei]

OK, so just "halt"? Because I did receive the "press any key to reboot" thing with "shutdown -h", but most of the times it just reboot. Not sure however of before or after prompting me to that line, because I didn't have any screen connected to the server.

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[jgreco]

"shutdown -h" ought to do the same thing. If you don't press any keys, it shouldn't reboot. Since your question is fundamentally about how to get the unit into a quiescent state so the UPS can de-energize the load safely, it seems like "halt" or "shutdown -h" would be the ticket. This should be testable easily enough. Just ssh into the unit and type "shutdown -h" and see what happens.

 

[Kei]

Unfortunately it does reboot nonetheless, very likely due to the same bug since no keys are pressed afterwards.

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[jgreco]

These ought to be different issues. The previously mentioned bug looks to me like ACPI failure. A simple "halt" shouldn't try any ACPI stuff. You'll probably want to find out what rolls by on the screen when you type a "halt" via ssh.

 

[Kei]

I agree with you, the halt command shouldn't even touch the ACPI, however other people with the same mobo reported issues even with the simple halt. I will definitely connect a screen to the server and check what's going on during the halt process.

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[Ericloewe]

What motherboard are we talking about?

 

[Kei]

Supermicro X10SL7-F at least, but the problem seems to hit other supermicro's aswell.

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