Remote boot

Posted Mar 25, 2005 13:51 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

IMO LILO is better especially for remote systems, because the LILO
installer tells you at install time that your lilo.conf is broken (so
you can fix it and rerun the installer), whereas Grub only tells you
that on boot time (and there is no way of checking the Grub config
file (or that you have it in the right place under the right name,
which cost us two hours to find out)); that's already a pain when you
work locally, but it would be a disaster for remote booting.

Other LILO vs. Grub issues:

- The grub-installer does not always work well. I knew the Linux and
BIOS and Grub names of the drives I wanted to specify, but
grub-install insisted that I use the Linux name for one of the drives,
but then failed to translate it to the format it needed, leving me
without a Grub.

- Grub is theoretically less brittle, since it accesses stuff through
file systems and since it has the command line as a fall-back. In
practice I have not had any problems in that direction from LILO.

- Since I use Grub (instead of LILO-20), poweroff powers the machine
down instead of leaving it running.

- (somewhat exotic:) Grub can switch BIOS drives around, LILO-20 could
do that (but the LILO-20 installer I used to use does not work with
the 2.6 kernel), LILO-21 could not; I think LILO-22 can again.

In conclusion: If LILO works for you, stick with it.