Re: how to make Debian less fragile (long and philosophical)
On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Justin Wells wrote:
>
>
> I would be satisfied with a backup root disk as a substitute for
> durable recovery tools if:
>
> 1. I could swap root in a running system without a reboot
>
> 2. Debian installs the backup root disk by default
>
> Debian could install the backup root by default, but I think swapping
> root on a live system is something that is currently beyond Debian's
> ability.
>
> I do often have backup roots on the system--so that I can reboot
> without being physically present at the machine. The minimal requirement
> when a backup root is available is that:
>
> 1. rebooting is OK (often it is not)
But you still might be able to chroot with that tool static linked.
>
> 2. i have a shell and enough static tools to alter what gets booted
> by default (the most common situation is I don't have a serial
> console on the remote machine) -or- I have a serial console on
> the remote machine--which is much desired, but rarer.
>
> Otherwise I'm in the same boat as with the boot floppy, where I have to
> buy a plane ticket and fly to wherever my server is (yes) or else walk
> some tape monkey through the procedure over the phone, assuming I
> can get the tape monkey in at 4am (failures always happen when it's
> least convenient).
Well, I take the two components off the boot floppy and put them in /boot,
and then set a LILO entry like:
image=/boot/linux
root=/dev/ram0
initrd=/boot/root.bin
append="load_ramdisk=1"
label=install
I typically use this for installing a new system on a spare partition
without having to find a working floppy disk. I usually have a mirror of
the distro on its own partition, so this is all I need to do the install.
This should work just as well for rescue purposes.
>
> A more common scenario is I am doing a bunch of maintenance from
> remote that MIGHT bring the machine down--and if it does, and I had to,
> I COULD go in to the office or hosting location and fix it--but it's 2am
> and I am at home and would like to go to sleep soon. If I have to go in
> it will cost me a couple of hours of sleep (but no critical business).
> If I can fix it from home, I get to go to sleep much sooner, and I don't
> have to go out into the cold freezing Toronto winter at night.
>
> And yes, admins do make OS/purchasing decisions based on how much
> sleep they're likely to get, and whether they'll have to go out
> into the cold freezing Toronto winter at night.
>
So we still need a static sulogin, at the very least, with enough tools to
actually recover the problem.(possibly only sash?)
BTW, I just created an alternate root login, gave the user name frog, and
the login shell /bin/sash, and I can log in as frog and do recovery type
work. (I removed some files that would only be possible as root)
You might want to use a different user name ;-) like rescue, or recover,
but the principle is sound, and you don't need the root login to run sash
all the time, so a static sulogin should be sufficient.
I just noticed that although sash has a version of tar, and gzip, it has
no ar, so, at least a static ar would be required to unpack a .deb by
hand.
Waiting is,
Dwarf
--
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