With the recent release of FreeBSD 4.10 I decided to upgrade my machine this weekend since I was still running a RC of 4.9.
I got the source, build the world and upgraded all the jails, it went perfect since I could slowly do the jails one by one as they kept working on just fine on the old 4.9 kernel, all the usual things that break like ps and so forth worked just fine.
When it came to upgrading the main host, it started going bad from the word go. First my serial console got itself corrupted and I could not type anything at all to the server, this means I could not do the installworld in single user mode. I shut everything down that I could essentially keeping the machine in multi user mode with just sshd running. Did the installworld and installkernel and rebooted.
I hoped at this point that the serial port would reset and things would be fine, but it seems now that the serial port was actually producing garbage to the console and ended up preventing the bootloader from choosing the right harddrive for the bootup.
I power cycled the machine with my remote power management and that was it, dead, no response at all.
After getting hold of the ISP and gaining access to the co-location facility I discovered the BIOS battery died at some point and when I power cycled the machine it forgot its BIOS settings, including the fact that it has to turn back on once it gets power :(
A quick replacement of the battery solved it and now its all fine again, I also turned off the motherboards console redirection relying on FreeBSD's. This way future console corruption won't prevent a bootup since the FreeBSD console stuff only kicks in after the bootloader.
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