On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 11:38:03AM +0000, James Harper wrote:
I've already got clonezilla working... maybe that has a recovery console, otherwise I can organise something else to boot up!
yes, it does. standard linux virtual consoles - Alt-F2, Alt-F3, and so on gives you a bash with all the utilities you'd need, and excellent support for just about every filesystem. clonezilla makes an excellent recovery system. you can also configure it with a password for the 'user' account so you can ssh in (and then sudo to root). you just need to add the following to the "append initrd ......" line in your pxelinux cfg file. usercrypted=XXXXXXXXXXXXX ocs_daemonon="ssh" where XXXXXXXXXXXXX is the crypted password, generate with something like: echo "secretpasswordhere" | mkpasswd -s then "ssh user@hostname" (ignore/bypass the ssh warnings about the host's key changing) and sudo to root. craig ps: when you mount the root fs (and boot fs if it's separate), remember to bind-mount the /proc, /sys, and /dev directories before you chroot to it. update-grub and grub-install need them, as do fdisk, blkid, and several other tools. cz can also be configured to run a custom script (which it fetches via http), and (amongst other things), mine adds the following aliases to /etc/profile for preparing the /mnt or /target directories for chroot: alias prepare-chroot-mnt='for i in proc dev sys ; do mount -o bind /$i /mnt/$i ; done' alias prepare-chroot-target='for i in proc dev sys ; do mount -o bind /$i /target/$i ; done' e.g. the initrd for my cz line also has this: ocs_prerun1="wget http://x.x.x.x/tftp/custom-ocs-2 -O /tmp/custom-ocs-2" ocs_prerun2="sync" ocs_prerun3="sleep 2" ocs_live_run="bash /tmp/custom-ocs-2" "custom-ocs-2" is a shell script. the name is completely arbitrary. it's run immediately before the main clonezilla menu. -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #426: internet is needed to catch the etherbunny