How to make Ubuntu 14 more tolerant of power cut

Question

We are developing an industrial machine running Ubuntu 14, with no keyboard or monitor. We have found that if power is lost during boot then at next boot the boot sequence waits for a keyboard entry at the Grub screen. Of course if there is no keyboard the the machine will not get past that point. Any ideas how to get around this?

Answer 1

Making an industrial machine fault tolerant is more then just tweaking some software settings: it's a combination of both hardware and software.

If frequent power failures are to be expected in the environment the machine will be operating in, a small UPS (preferably built into the power supply) will be needed. (5 minute autonomy would be sufficient for 95% of the cases I've ever met)

This will allow you to install a UPS daemon that will allow the machine to recover gracefully from:

• Relatively small power surges. (red-out)
• Continue to provide power during power sags. (brown-out)
• Smooth out noisy power sources/consumers. (Red-brown-out)
• Provide power for some time during a black-out.

And depending on your use case, dust-proofing, water-proofing, gas-proofing, heat-proofing and/or radiation-proofing might be advisable as well or your equipment will die at or about ½ to ¼ of its MTBF.

And waiting for a keyboard must be disabled both in the BIOS and in /etc/default/grub The parameter is.

Answer 2

In order to disable waiting for key press in grub you will have to edit grub file located at /etc/default. Thus once you will have to use keyboard for changing settings.

Open Terminal and enter following command

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

(Edit /etc/default/grub and change the values of following parameters as :)

GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=false
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_RECORDFAIL_TIMEOUT=5

Save the file.

Then execute

sudo update-grub