When you power up the firewall, you should see a Boot: prompt appear on the display. This prompt allows you to enter various boot options; the main ones of interest3.2 are summarised in Figure 3.5. You should very rarely need to use any of these options.
Booting into single-user mode may be useful for repairing the system after a crash (for example, due to a power outage), where the automatic recovery mechanisms are inadequate. A password may be required (this is a configureable option).
After entering any desired options press the ENTER key to continue booting the system. If you don't enter any options within a few seconds of the boot prompt appearing, the boot process will continue automatically.
You should then see either a spinning character indicating progress, or, if you entered a `-c' or `-v' option at the boot prompt, a series of messages describing the result of hardware probes and the system startup. If your system freezes during the boot, this may be because of attempts by the kernel to auto-detect (`probe') hardware devices. Usually this is not a problem, as you can configure your hardware setup from the fwadmin program. However, if your machine will not complete a boot sequence, you may not have this opportunity. In this case you can change the hardware configuration by using the `-c' boot option to access the boot-time kernel configuration editor. This is described in more detail in Section 7.5.
