Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjsw | Hacker News Reader

Why would booting be slower ?

My BSD systems boot quickly enough for me.

My FreeBSD system has a 30-second timeout during which the entire boot process is halted because it waits for a default route to the internet... which it won't get, because I haven't configured one.

It's pretty dumb, and not enough of a problem for me that I'd figure out how to work around it, but it's a pretty good example.

Just set in rc.conf:

   defaultrouter="NO"

It shouldn't hang.

I don't think this 30-second timeout is a bug in FreeBSD or in rc. You may want your server to wait for the network to become available. Ubuntu Server has the same "waiting for network" timeout:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/63456/waiting-for-network-con...

But the only reason this is necessary is when the boot system isn't smart enough to start whatever can safely be started through proper dependencies.

My experience is that a substantial amount of time is wasted weeding out undesired timeouts in startup scripts, because they lead to increasing downtime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com