[plug] Looking for a good rescue disk

[Cameron Patrick]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 11:32:50AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:

| I ran into this unfortunate issue with the Debian boot disks the other 
| day. I eventually compiled a static version of resize2fs, popped it on 
| an NFS-accessable volume, mounted the NFS volume from the boot disk and 
| used it from there.

It was at a CA workshop and I was there when you did it ;-)  (Unless
you've done the same trick again more recently...)  I've also done
something similar but even hairier involving compiling an alpha
resize2fs binary, booting with woody boot-floppies, mke2fs'ing the swap
partition temporarily ('cos a static resize2fs was too big to fit on the
ram disc) amd wget'ing it.  Urgh.

Avoiding this kind of pain is the goal here. :-)

| That said - I'm sure there's a better way. There's always a Knoppix CD 
| if you can CD-boot the machine, but I don't know what's out there for 
| netboot rescue disks. I've got a home-built one here, but it's rather 
| less than polished.

I normally use Knoppix[1], but this is on a Wizard with no CDROM drive
:( Even an unpolished home-made one would be useful - if you could put
it up on the web somewhere, that'd be great.

Thanks for the suggestions anyway.

Cameron.

[1] I wonder if Knoppix could be modified to be netbootable and run over
NFS... hmmm...  *googles*
	http://mailman.linuxtag.org/pipermail/debian-knoppix/2002-June/000473.html
Subject line is "Knoppix over NFS", but it's in German and talks about
needing "den Kernel patchen" and "ein dhcp-Client schon im Kernel".